


Contingency

by populuxe



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Central Intelligence Agency, Cold War, Interrogation, M/M, Mind Control, Nuclear Weapons, Politics, References to the Holocaust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2020-01-24
Packaged: 2021-01-22 10:37:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 73,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21300668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/populuxe/pseuds/populuxe
Summary: Erik kills Klaus Schmidt on New Year’s Day, 1961. In New York City two years later, he attends a lecture on the future of genetic mutation.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier, Raven | Mystique/Angel Salvadore (background)
Comments: 230
Kudos: 269
Collections: X-Men Big Bang 2018-2019





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> In logic, a contingency is statement that is neither true nor false by itself—it depends on factual context—and in common usage, contingencies are events that are “dependent on or conditioned by something else.” From [this interview with Hannah Arendt](https://web.archive.org/web/20170222205715/http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/10/26/hannah-arendt-from-an-interview/), because how else would I title an X-Men fanfic?
>
>> _Nobody knows what is going to happen because so much depends on an enormous number of variables, on simple hazard. On the other hand if you look at history retrospectively, then, even though it was contingent, you can tell a story that makes sense … This, is the real problem of every philosophy of history how is it possible that in retrospect it always looks as though it couldn’t have happened otherwise?_
> 
> A note: _X-Men: First Class_ is glorious for many reasons, but not least because of how shamelessly it inserts the characters into major historical events. Since Kevin Bacon single-handedly brokers the Cuban Missile Crisis, killing him several years prior leads us down a path of (light!) counterfactual Cold War history.
> 
> Written for the X-Men Big Bang 2018-2019, with *ridiculously* beautiful art by **[araydre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/araydre)**! (Full art post [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21320869/chapters/50775106).)
> 
> A million thank yous to my beta, **[1degosuperego](https://archiveofourown.org/users/1degosuperego)**, who is not only a brilliant editor but whose encouragement was basically the reason I actually wrote this and felt confident enough to post it. Seriously: <33333

  


Sometimes, Erik wonders what his life would have been like if the first mutant he’d knowingly met had been anyone other than Emma Frost.

*

One hour to midnight, the party is in full swing. The penthouse is done up in a garish modern style, with floor-to-ceiling glass doors running along an entire wall. Half the guests are gathered on the other side, on a wide balcony overlooking the sprawl of Buenos Aires. Inside, amongst tuxedos and evening gowns and tedious little silver paper hats, there is entirely too much German floating around for Erik’s liking—but he’s under no illusions about the guest list for the evening, given the couple who own the place and the money they bought it with.

He grabs a champagne flute from the tray of a passing waiter and is surveying the contents of partygoers’ jetted pockets and silk clutches when he feels a light mental nudge. He grips the delicate stem of the glass a bit tighter as he takes a sip.

_Relax, sugar. He’s not here yet._

Emma’s mental voice, just like her external one, always manages to sound bored and amused at the same time.

_But I thought—_

He’s cut off by a tap on the shoulder, and Emma is standing beside him, dressed in a shimmering white floor-length gown, an elaborately layered diamond necklace at her throat. She plucks the champagne from his hand and downs the glass in one go.

“Don’t worry,” she says, smiling tightly. “Slight change of plans, but I’m not concerned.”

He grips her bare arm and pulls her closer. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” she says, rolling her eyes and tugging her arm free. “You’d think after all these months you’d have learned to trust me.”

“Forgive me if I’m a bit tense on the single most—”

“_Relax_,” she repeats. She takes a step back and gives him an approving once-over. “For all your faults, you sure do clean up nice.”

Erik sighs. “Emma—”

She laughs, throwing her head back and exposing a long line of diamond-clad neck. “Get another glass of champagne and try not to murder any of these Nazis in the next half hour, all right? After tonight, you’ll have a lifetime to kill them.” She gives him a pat on the arm before brushing past, vanishing into the sea of blond hair and white dinner jackets.

Erik had met Emma eight months prior, on a train from Zurich to Milan. A trustworthy source had assured him that Schmidt would be onboard, and while he was waiting for the train to climb up a remote Alpine pass—the spot he’d pinpointed as the best to separate one carriage from the rest—a blond woman in a white traveling cloak and pillbox hat had slipped into his compartment and proceeded to read his mind. He ripped out the door handle and was still fashioning it into a projectile when her entire body transformed to diamond.

It was only as he was stretching the door handle into a thin steel cable and wrapping it around her crystalline neck that he realized: he wasn’t the only one with seemingly inexplicable abilities. He wasn’t alone.

Emma, he learned, had been traveling with Schmidt for about a year, sharing his bed if and when Schmidt felt like it. He had half a dozen aliases that Erik was aware of, but she knew him as Sebastian Shaw. They’d fought the night before, the most recent in a string of violent arguments, and when she’d come to in their hotel room that morning, she was bound tightly to the bedframe and Schmidt was gone.

“That’s that, I think,” she’d said, her mouth stretching into a close-lipped smile while her eyes remained impassive. “We all have limits. I suppose I’ve found mine.” She cocked her head to one side and studied him for a moment. “You were going to try to kill him today.”

Erik snorted. “Not just _try_, I assure you.”

“While the bluster suits you, it’s not as simple as that,” she said, her tone skirting the edge of mockery. “Sebastian’s like us.”

“He’s nothing like—”

“He’s a mutant,” she said, and whether his expression or his mind gave him away, she elaborated. “Genetic mutation. That’s how I can do this—” She tapped the side of her head with one long fingernail, and then gestured to the malformed door handle lying at her feet. “We’re not anomalies—we’re more evolved. Didn’t you know?”

He hadn’t known. He’d wondered, abstractly, about the root of his power, but he’d never seen much sense questioning the one thing he knew for certain was truly a part of him—the single reason he was alive today, and the reason that many people who had deserved to pay for their crimes were not.

But to hear that Schmidt was extraordinary as well—and to think of everything he’d done to Erik, without saying a word of his own abilities, the rows upon rows of instruments he’d—

_Stop_.

The word reverberated inside his skull, the full weight of a command beneath it, and he blinked and looked up. He’d been pulling the ceiling of the compartment downwards in his rage. Emma frowned and folded her arms across her chest.

“You need to learn to control yourself, honey,” she said.

Erik ignored her, pushing the ceiling back upwards with a flick of the wrist. “What’s Schmidt’s power?”

She looked at him evenly for a beat, and then sighed. “He absorbs kinetic energy. Hit him with anything and it just makes him stronger.”

“And your…” He gestured vaguely at the side of his head.

Her frown deepened. “His mind…is unusual. It’s dense. Even reading it, it’s like…like pushing a knife through a block of wet cement.”

“But could you hold him still? Or put him to sleep?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Unless…”

He leaned forward. “Unless what?”

Had they met a month earlier, or maybe a month later, they would have tried to kill each other in earnest. Emma later admitted as much, during one of their check-ins, clandestine calls from hotel lobbies in far-flung locations. But if her relationship with Schmidt was like a pendulum, Erik had caught her on a downswing, and after that, there was no swinging back. She began the slow, methodical work of seeding Schmidt’s mind with telepathic triggers, pushing forward every day, so small he’d never notice the difference.

Erik stirs from the memory as he commandeers a fresh glass of champagne. He’s fantasizing about gouging peoples’ eyes out with their own hairpins and cufflinks when he spots Emma again, clear across the room. A man with a dark curtain of hair is leaning in to whisper something in her ear.

_Janos has readied a room upstairs. All we need is Sebastian_.

Her voice is as clear as if she’d spoken six inches from his face. _Of course it is_, she says disdainfully.

He laughs softly as he takes a sip of champagne. A man opens the door to the balcony and shouts, “_Quince minutos!_” and the rising anticipation in the crowd is palpable, corks popping as waiters hurry to refill the guests’ glasses. Erik’s own anticipation is a tight thrumming sensation just beneath the skin, his entire mind sharpening around his goal, like turning a lens into focus. Fifteen minutes until—

_He’s here, and he’s moving fast_, Emma cuts in. _Get upstairs_.

Erik abandons his glass and slips up the stairs as the rest of the crowd is pushing towards the balcony.

_Second door on the left_.

It’s a bedroom, the enormous bed in the center done up in pristine white linens, and Erik takes a seat in the low-slung leather chair in the corner.

After a few minutes, Azazel appears in a burst of sulfuric smoke, dressed in his standard high-collared jacket, his tail swishing behind him.

“Everything ready?” Erik asks. Azazel jumps and whirls around, clutching his chest.

“Christ, Lehnsherr, are you planning on just giving him a heart attack while you lurk in the shadows?”

“Let’s call that Plan B,” Erik says.

Azazel laughs. “Well I’m happy to report that Plan A is moving along swimmingly,” he says.

After a few months of their calls, Emma had brought Azazel and Janos into the fold. Azazel had popped the trio down to Haifa, where Erik had been picking up details for a brief, diverting assignment hunting down an SS officer, and they’d spent an evening brainstorming specific scenarios for Schmidt’s demise. Temperamentally, they were opposites—Azazel was as gregarious as Janos was reserved—but neither man felt any great loyalty to Schmidt; Emma, they said, had drawn a more convincing picture of the future.

Plan A is Emma on Schmidt’s arm as he greets his old friends at the party, laying on the sex appeal to coax him upstairs. “I’ll play up the teasing in the final few weeks,” she’d promised in their last phone call before he’d flown to Argentina. “Lift the embargo, as it were, at the party.”

Erik doesn’t envy Emma her role in all of this, but he’s long believed that no sacrifice is too great in pursuit of an outcome.

As if on cue, the door slams open, and Emma pushes a man in a double-breasted tuxedo into the room. It looks more like they’re attacking each others’ faces than kissing. Schmidt seems poised to push her down on the bed—they need _him_ there, and Erik nearly rises to intervene—but Emma reaches for Schmidt’s belt buckle and deftly switches their positions. With one final bruising kiss, she presses him down against the mattress.

She stands, looming over Schmidt’s prone form, and Erik finally gets a good glimpse of the man; his hair is longer, the mustache gone, but somehow, he doesn’t seem to have aged at all in the past decade and a half. Erik stands too, and as he and Azazel approach the bed, Schmidt’s glazed-over expression clears and he snaps into focus, confusion giving way to anger as he seems to recognize Erik.

“How—?”

“Don’t worry your pretty little head about that,” Emma says with a smile. She leans over and presses a long silver-painted fingernail to each of his temples. “Goodnight, Sebastian.”

Schmidt’s eyes roll back in his head and his face goes slack. Emma prods at his face for a moment, then taps his temples once more for good measure. “He’s out.”

Erik kept the coin that could have saved mother’s life, if only he’d been strong enough to move it, and it’s been sitting in his pocket all these years, a reminder of everything he couldn’t do, and everything he would do someday. He pulls it out now, and it hovers in the air. Absently, he tries to process that the moment he’s dedicated more than half his life to is finally here. Schmidt looks smaller than he remembers.

“_Herr Doktor_,” he begins. “Here’s what we’re going to—”

“I don’t want to interrupt what will likely be a very moving speech,” Emma cuts in. “But you have about 90 seconds, tops, before he wakes up.”

Erik glares at her. She raises her hands in a gesture of protest.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she says. “Do you want to kill him, or should Azazel take over?”

“He’s mine to kill,” Erik bites out.

He focuses everything within him on the coin, and it vibrates as he pushes it forward. He hears Schmidt’s voice in his head, counting to three, as the metal hits flesh and then bone, and he’s pushing, pushing, pushing—

“It’s done, sugar,” Emma says quietly. Erik slowly lowers his arms. Schmidt’s eyes are still closed and blood is pooling beneath his head, blossoming out across the crisp white bedding.

Distantly, he hears the countdown from ten, a mix of Spanish and German, from the party below. There’s a knock at the door and Janos appears, a bottle of champagne in one hand and four glasses in the other.

Azazel takes the bottle and pops the cork as an enormous cheer rises up from downstairs. They each take a glass as he pours. Erik takes his absently; he can still feel the coin, warm and resting beneath Schmidt’s skull.

Emma raises her glass and smiles. “Happy New Year, gentlemen,” she says as they clink their glasses together. “Welcome to 1961.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (come and talk to me on tumblr!! [x-populuxe.tumblr.com](http://x-populuxe.tumblr.com))


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to the incredibly talented **[araydre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/araydre)** for the art in this chapter, which looks exactly like the scene did in my head (!).

The hangar is cavernous, and when Erik steps inside, it nearly takes his breath away: they are surrounded by steel on all sides, piles and piles of it, beams and scaffolding and half built airplanes. In the low light, what he can sense stretches far beyond the distance he can see. 

Erik can barely remember how the world felt before his powers took hold. He has few memories from his first thirteen years—most of his childhood lies just out of reach, like trying to peer through smudged glass. But he cannot fathom what it would be like to stand amongst so much steel and not feel it in his core, far deeper than the five standard senses. 

“Eisenhardt. All clear?” 

The speaker is cast in shadow halfway across the width of the hangar, but Erik recognizes the voice, the German heavily accented but strong.

“Szabó,” he calls back. “All clear.” 

In his long decade and a half hunting Schmidt, Erik had only worked for the Israelis when their targets aligned. It happened often enough—the trail to Schmidt, after all, was littered with high-ranking Nazi officers, cowering in South American exile or, worse somehow, hiding in plain sight in Europe. Collaboration has never come naturally to him, but in those years it had been simpler than engaging in some sort of race, or finding targets dead before he was able to extract the information he needed.

Now he takes their assignments with a vague sense of retribution for the entire scope of the war, so much harder to grasp than the single-minded pursuit of the man who’d shot his mother in the head. He’s always turned down more jobs than he’s taken, but in the months since he killed Schmidt, he’s been restless, unmoored, looking for a place to channel his rage. While the world’s been watching the trial in Jerusalem, he’s done his part to quietly take down the rest of Mossad’s targets, one by one. 

And when they’d laid out the details of this particular plan, with the lure of a lucrative fictional deal for aerospace weapons manufactory, he was on a flight to Montevideo the next morning.

Szabó is ten yards away, crossing towards him at a 45-degree angle. He’s clearly unmoved by the industrial majesty of it all, but Szabó is generally unmoved by the world, unflappability edging up against dourness. Erik tracks him as he draws closer—his belt buckle, the nails in his shoes, the pistol held low at his side, the smaller service weapon strapped to his right ankle.

Erik carries only a knife. He doesn’t hide his powers from these agents, and neither they nor their points of contact mention it in turn. They share a mutual goal and a propensity for prioritizing the success of a mission over everything else. 

“Can you sense him?” 

Beside him now, Szabó’s mouth is set with a sort of satisfied determination. Erik pushes past the static metal surrounding them, looking for any sort of movement. Seconds tick by, until—

“He’s approaching.” 

It’s a tank of a car, carrying four passengers and what feels like the contents of a small armory, moving at a clip up the dirt road towards the hangar. Szabó nods and jerks his head as he inches to the left. Erik moves to the right, until they’ve both slipped back into shadow. 

Amidst slamming doors and heavy footsteps as the crew enters the hangar, he can catch snippets of their conversation. 

“—eight thousand, perhaps nine,” Danziger is telling the others, speaking in German and leading them into the hangar, towards an unprotected, brightly lit strip in the center.

Erik catalogues their targets, all three of them tall and broad-shouldered with slicked blond hair and thin mustaches, dressed in the sort of boxy suits that have been slowly going out of fashion for the past few years. He instantly recognizes Vries from the files, square-jawed and lankier than the rest. Danziger is well-armed, but these men are covered from head to toe in weaponry, and the irony is satisfying—their paranoia will make them that much easier to kill. 

In a Paris hotel room, he once killed a husband and wife with the woman’s hat pin. At a café in Algiers, it was blunt force to the head with the ashtray he and his target had been sharing; he’d taken a moment to dump the cigarette butts in a tidy pile before he’d put the full force of his power behind it. The first time he set foot in Germany after the war, it was a man’s butter knife, whisked across the linen tablecloth, sharpened as it sailed through the air, and thrust through the ribs while Erik sipped a coffee clear across the restaurant. 

“I had a few factories of this size, during the war,” Vries is saying, hands in his pockets as he shuffles across the cement. It’s delivered with such carelessness—with so little indication of the precise nature of the thousands of deaths linked to those factories—that Erik struggles to resist forcing the man to pummel himself in the face via the brushed steel of his wristwatch. 

There is a sort of symmetry in turning peoples’ ordinary possessions against them: his power renders him a weapon, but it’s so deeply embedded that it feels ordinary, a capacity for violence sewn into his skin—or, now that he’s had Emma’s brief science lesson, into his genetic makeup.

“Ah yes, I’ve heard you were extraordinarily…industrious during the war,” Danziger is telling Vries, somehow injecting precisely the right amount of admiration to make it believable. These agents are better actors than anyone Erik has ever seen onstage.

Vries takes a step in Erik’s direction, peering into the darkness. “How about we turn on a few more lights?” 

“Of course,” Danziger says, walking briskly to the far wall. Erik can feel Szabó pulling out his weapon, as Vries’ companions surreptitiously finger their own guns.

Danziger flips the switches one by one, and as the hangar is flooded with light, their targets spot Erik and Szabó flanking them. Szabó wastes no time, firing a quick round as Erik simultaneously pulls the guns from the outstretched hands of Vries’ companions. The shortest of the three takes Szabó’s bullet to the gut and drops to the ground; Erik flips one of the confiscated guns and shoots the other point-blank in the chest. He turns to Vries and pulls the trigger again—

“Eisenhardt, are you all right?” 

Erik’s flat on his back, and when he looks up at the hangar’s ceiling, his vision is spotty. He pushes up into a seated position and is overcome by a swooping wave of dizziness. Szabó is on the ground, too; he can’t see Danziger, who’s still shouting his name, so muffled it sounds as if he’s underwater.

Vries is still standing, encompassed by a sort of translucent, shimmering cloud, and he throws back his head in laughter. “Glad to see you brought someone with special talents as well,” he calls out, and then claps his hands. Erik can see the pulse spread outwards in a ring around Vries, until it sweeps over him and knocks him on his back again.

Erik had spent less than 48 hours in Buenos Aires with Emma, Janos, and Azazel after they killed Schmidt. He’d been restless and keyed-up; Emma had complained about his residual energy spilling over for hours before shifting to diamond for the rest of their time together. He hadn’t been sure where to go next, but he had to keep moving—he’d spent his entire adult life moving, and he had no idea how to stop.

“Do you think there are others?” he’d asked Emma as he lit a cigarette. They were seated on the balcony of the hotel suite they were sharing. She frowned, her gaze following the cigarette as he tapped the ashtray. Her diamond form did have its drawbacks.

“Other mutants?” She scoffed as she folded her arms across her chest. “Of course, sugar. What would the odds be of us meeting if there were only, say, half a dozen of us in the world?” 

“How many, though?” 

Emma’s expressions were more opaque in diamond form, but she looked thoughtful for a moment before shaking her head. “We never had any concrete idea. Sebastian had his theories.” 

She’d been dropping his name casually in conversation in the hours since Erik had pushed the reichsmark through his skull, and every mention sent a little jolt of anger through him. He pulled at the cigarette a little too harshly, smoke burning at the back of his throat. 

“But his plan was to recruit them,” he said. “Is that your plan, too?”

Emma was silent for a long beat, looking out at the city. “I need a little time to myself,” she said, her eyes fixed on a point on the horizon. “I want to sort out what I want from what he wanted.” 

“Fair enough,” Erik said, stubbing out the cigarette. He followed her gaze out over the stretch of rooftops. He understood the desire to get Klaus Schmidt out of his head.

He didn’t tell them he was leaving. He was up before dawn the next morning, when Emma and Janos were still asleep; Azazel was nowhere to be found, much like he’d been for the previous two days, presumably popping from one side of the world to the other simply because he could. Hours later, in the central train station, he felt the bizarre sensation of a nudge inside his skull. 

_We’ll see you before too long, Lehnsherr._

Emma’s mental voice somehow recalled a firm handshake, a promise—or a threat—embedded in the words. Before he could formulate a response, he felt her withdrawing from his head. 

The question stuck with him in the months that followed, as he moved from one Mossad assignment to the next, propelled less by desire or intent than by pure, mindless inertia. If he met another mutant, how would he know? Schmidt clearly collected mutants with easily weaponized powers—but did every power have the potential to kill? Mossad looked the other way as he ripped beams from ceilings and turned targets’ weapons against them; were other governments aware of people like him? Were they _using _people like him?

Mossad prided themselves on preparing for every eventuality—and since they hadn’t mentioned Vries could create sonic blasts with a clap of his hands, they clearly hadn’t known. Szabó is struggling to his feet, so Erik tries the same, but he can’t hold onto his center of gravity for more than a second before falling backwards again. 

He stares upwards and takes stock of the metal in the immediate vicinity; he can’t feel whatever is surrounding Vries, but he can feel the gun holstered at his hip. Then, as gunshots ring out, he can feel them bounce off Vries’s protective cloud as Szabó ducks for cover. 

“I guess some special talents are more potent than others,” Vries says, stepping towards him.

The disdain in his voice is enough to provoke Erik’s ire, which luckily only strengthens his powers. He summons all of his strength and _pulls_, dislodging a pair of massive steal beams that rush towards Vries’s head. 

When they bounce off the protective field, the blowback is so strong that Erik bites his tongue hard enough to taste blood. They land with a deafening series of thuds on either side of him. 

Schmidt had always been interested in the spectacle of Erik’s powers. Their time together began with the smallest task—to move a coin an inch across a desk—but the years that followed were marked by feats of strength as he pushed and prodded at Erik, dreaming up new stressors every week, peering over his half-moon spectacles and making notes in a small leather book like some grotesque parody of a scientist. 

Erik only learned later, as he crisscrossed the continent, that power wasn’t just strength—it was also control. His first instincts remain the bluntest, and not always the most effective.

Gun, belt, cufflinks, a handful of coins in his pockets, but he chooses Vries’s tie clip. Erik gives it an experimental tug; even if he can’t push metal through the man’s shield, his powers work just fine from within it. He yanks the tie clip forward and upwards, and jams it into the man’s carotid artery. 

By the time Erik is able to stand, Vries has collapsed in a heap. There’s an extraordinary amount of blood. Szabó and Danziger join him, forming a triangle around the body.

“This was supposed to be a clean job,” Szabó says with sardonic smile. Danziger’s been hit with a spray of blood across the side of the face, and he barks out a laugh. 

Erik chuckles softly, and then begins to laugh in earnest, as Szabó and Danziger join in. He laughs until it’s barely funny anymore, as the full weight of a hangar full of steel rushes through his veins.

*

In the fifties, Erik’s map of Europe was an interlocking trail connecting Schmidt and his allies, old and new. He tried to keep these points, one X after another, separate from the map of the rest of his life—his history, the things he generally tried not to think about, carefully locked away. 

The early years in Düsseldorf, ones that would be too early to remember even without the war; his later childhood in Warsaw, punctuated by fear, life there crumbling day by day as they inched towards the inevitability of the camps. Afterwards, at seventeen, meeting Magda again; a year later, the small village where they’d made their home, the place where she’d give birth to Anya.

He’d last been in Poland towards the end of 1958, but he hadn’t returned to the village where they’d lived. After the war, Magda had been reticent to stay in Poland at all; despite everything that had happened, reports of attacks against Jews filtered through the village at a steady clip. In the end, as whispers about the strange things Erik appeared to be capable of spread through the village, their neighbors set fire to their house for a different reason. 

His record as both a husband and a father had been patchy at best, the single-minded pursuit of vengeance a fourth at their table when he was home. But his relationship with Magda could not survive the death of their daughter, even if he hadn’t been directly responsible. 

(Even the argument about responsibility—the fine distinction between cause and culpability—was a knot they couldn’t begin to unpick.) 

In 1958, he met their former neighbor, Kamiński, at a shabby tavern a good 40 miles from the village where they’d lived. Erik assured him he had no intent to return to a place that had made its feelings about him so abundantly clear. 

Magda, he was told in turn, had emigrated, though Kamiński would not say to where. As his voice raised in pitch, he seemed to remember why they drove Erik out of town in the first place, visibly flinching as he eyed the shotgun mounted above the bar. Erik didn’t bother telling him that he wouldn’t need something so obvious. Kamiński wore a fine-chained crucifix tucked under his shirt, the metal hot against his fluttering pulse.

Now Erik’s map of Europe is wide open, but without dots to connect, he’s adrift. He collects his fee for the Montevideo job via a handoff in Rome, and then he takes a train to Paris, where he’s kept a small bedsit for years. The room is modest and worn, but kept spotless by the building’s caretaker; its best feature is its proximity to the Eiffel Tower, just close enough for Erik to feel the wrought-iron lattice without having to truly concentrate. 

The first frost has come and gone, and a chill has settled over the city as shopkeepers string up lights in their windows. Erik still traces Paris via memory—safe houses, drop-off points, respectable hotels with less respectable clientele—but he makes a concerted effort to try to go through the motions of an ordinary life. He passes a week mostly sitting in cafés, drinking strong coffee and reading the papers—most of which are dominated by empty rhetoric passing between the Americans and the Soviets—and a few battered paperbacks he finds in the flat’s armoire. 

On a whim, he picks up a primer on genetics from a small shop along the Seine. Back at the flat, he lays on the bed and plods through its near-impenetrable prose, wondering if the subject would be less miserable in German than in French as he absently traces the base of the Eiffel Tower, sinking his power into the sturdiness of it. 

Nearly a month since he left Uruguay, Erik hasn’t been able to shake off the encounter with Vries. He’s spent fifteen years priding himself on his compartmentalization skills, his ability to mentally shuffle a person from potential target to another completed X on the map. 

But Vries’s power was so strong, and so obviously weaponizable—he’d surely employed it during and since the war, and would have continued to do so, if they hadn’t killed him. His mind circles around baseless speculation, calculating wildly high estimates and wildly low ones. How many mutated people exist in the world? How many ‘special talents’ are being hidden?

He’s on a page with a frustratingly high quantity of Latin when he jolts at the feeling of a familiar pressure inside his skull.

_Fancy meeting you here_. 

Emma’s mental voice feels like twinkling laughter. Erik sits up with a frown.

_We haven’t _met _anywhere_. He tries to project loudly and clearly. _I’m in my flat_. 

There’s a sudden popping burst of sulfur, and Emma and Azazel are standing in his bedsit. They’re as dramatic as ever, her head-to-toe white regalia against his high-collared black pinstripes and bright red skin, and they look utterly out of place against the shabby, quotidien room.

“We just happened to be in the neighborhood,” Emma says airily. 

Erik snaps his book shut and tosses it on the nightstand. “Quite the coincidence,” he says lightly, taking care to imply he thinks it’s anything but. “Of all the streets in Paris.”

Emma gives him a smile that borders on insincere, but Azazel only laughs. 

“Care to join us for a drink?” He stretches out a broad red palm.

Erik looks from Azazel to Emma and back again before nodding once. He barely has time to slip into his shoes before Azazel claps him on the shoulder and the room spins out of sight.

They’re holed up in what was surely one of Schmidt’s properties, an improbably preserved relic of pre-war Paris. The place is massive, full of damask and heavy velvet drapery, with the sort of fin-de-siècle gilding that toes the line between beautiful and ostentatious. 

Azazel deposits Erik in a stiff green Louis XIV chair, before heading towards a sideboard against the far wall and pulling out a set of glasses. Emma stretches out across from him on a matching sofa, crossing one white knee-high boot over the other. 

“Janos is out with our newest additions,” Emma says before Erik can ask. 

“Additions?” 

“We’ve been collecting,” she says, offering an enigmatic smile. “Turns out Sebastian and I both shared an interest in useful mutations.”

“Useful?” Erik accepts a heavy crystal tumbler from Azazel, with a generous pour of what smells like a well-aged single-malt. 

“Is there an echo in here?” Azazel says with a chuckle, handing Emma a glass of her own. He joins her on the couch, his tail curling over its intricately-carved arm.

“Don’t worry, sugar, _I’m_ not interested in starting World War III,” she tells Erik. 

“I haven’t seen you in nearly a year,” Erik reminds her as he takes a careful sip. The scotch is even better than it smells. “I have no idea what you’re interested in.” 

When she raises an eyebrow but remains silent, he adds, “For that matter, I never really knew what you were interested in aside from…taking care of Schmidt.”

They both burst out laughing at this, and Erik frowns. 

“Pot and kettle!” Emma crows. As the laughter trails off she tilts her head to the side, eyes narrowing slightly. “Or maybe the trouble is there was never much more to you than that.”

“_Get out of my head_.” He thinks it as forcefully as he can manage as he bites out the words. Emma flinches slightly. 

“Touchy,” she says, inspecting her nails with forced casualness. “Don’t worry, honey. I, for one, have always seen your true potential.” 

“Is that so?” Erik says flatly. “Potential for what, exactly?” 

He gets a quick flash of a vision that isn’t his own—fire and destruction and buildings being ripped apart, beam by beam. He looks at Emma sharply. 

“I thought you didn’t want to start World War III.” 

She sighs and sips delicately from her glass. “I don’t, necessarily. But the ability to take a building down might come in handy.”

“And who are we attacking?”

“Whoever stands between us and other mutants,” she says, raising her eyebrows. “Like I said, we’ve been collecting.” 

Erik raises his eyebrows in turn as he finishes off the last of his drink. The perpetual question rises up again: How many? Emma stands and plucks his glass out of his hand, taking it over to the sideboard and opening a crystal decanter. 

“We still don’t have any hard evidence, but I’d say at least a few thousand,” she says to his unvoiced question, refilling both their glasses. “We’ve recruited two so far, and we have leads on half a dozen others in a few different cities.” 

“And you just, what, ask them to join your mutant club?” 

Emma smiles as she hands him back his glass. “Something like that.” 

“You don’t want to start a war,” he says slowly. “But you’re building an army.” 

She raises her glass as her smile grows broader. She repeats, “Something like that.”


	3. Chapter 3

When he opens his eyes, his entire field of vision is _blue_.

Everything is also extraordinarily loud, and it feels like a small set of hammers are tapping softly but persistently against the periphery of his skull. He closes his eyes again.

“Charles, for God’s sake!”

The shout is accompanied by a hard shove to the chest, and Charles opens his eyes once more and looks properly this time. Raven is looming over him, her mouth set in an angry line. Her annoyance—along with a few choice phrases—is radiating so strongly that he can’t block it out, despite his steadfast, if often a bit flimsy, attempt to honor their pledge and keep out of her head.

He’s lying on his bed, half dressed; his waistcoat is unbuttoned but his shirt is still done up, while his shoes have been removed and his trousers are nowhere in sight. The room is far too bright, and the hammering intensifies. He flops backwards again and closes his eyes.

“Kill me now, Raven.”

“I’ll kill you after you get rid of the woman in the shower, you prick,” she hisses, yanking him upright. She looks down and then yelps, slapping her hands over her eyes. “Find your underwear, then get rid of her, and _then_ I’ll kill you.”

Through the sharp misery of his hangover, Charles quickly shuffles through the events of the previous evening. They were at the pub celebrating his doctorate ceremony; he remembers his thesis advisor bowing out early, followed by some competitive drinking, followed by an unusually large amount of whiskey, even by his standards. But after that…

Raven crosses her arms over her chest, frowning at him. “You don’t even remember bringing her back here, do you?”

Charles pinches the bridge of his nose. “Give me a moment.”

His powers can’t do much for physical symptoms of a hangover, but they can certainly erase the pain. He concentrates for a moment and the hammering stops, like a veil being gently lifted from his head. He casts his mind to the next room and locates a woman stepping out of the shower and toweling off. He feels like a cad for rifling through the head of a woman he can’t even remember sleeping with, but needs must. Raven narrows her eyes.

“Are you going through that woman’s memories because you can’t remember who she is?”

Raven’s often alarmingly perceptive for a person without telepathy. Charles gives her what he hopes is a winsome look; he’s rewarded with a loud noise of disgust. She he shifts to her default disguise—peach skin, long blond hair, a minidress that surely would be too short for any brother’s comfort—and stomps out of the room. He flops back against the mattress with a sigh.

The woman in the shower is named Rebecca, she’s reading medieval history, and, helpfully, she’s replaying a good portion of the night in vivid detail. She lingers over one bit for a few minutes, and he kicks himself for being so far gone that he couldn’t remember it himself. As she slips back into her dress, he scrambles to pull on a pair of trousers.

“Charles?” She knocks lightly as she pushes open the door.

He stands and gives her a weak smile, kissing her on the cheek. “Good morning, Rebecca.”

She blushes, even as she’s thinking about how he looks a bit worse for wear, which he concedes is probably a fair assessment. He weighs the merits of asking her to breakfast, and he looks again to see her thinking the same—even while she’s envisioning having a cup of tea in her own bed.

In her crueler moments, when they are fighting about the things Charles will or will not do, Raven will pull out the phrase “mind control.” The words are meant to hurt him, and they do—it often turns his stomach. The trouble is, the accusations aren’t baseless; they skirt the truth, or perhaps, the truth of his potential.

But Charles tries not to outright change peoples’ minds, or give them new thoughts, or alter their memories—that’s tricky business, and one small shift can have disastrous consequences. Most of the time, he merely nudges, or smooths over the bumps in a conversation. People waffle, but he can see the layers beneath, the subconscious desire beneath the ordered logic of their higher functions.

Rebecca really is quite pretty—but she’s also very polite. He nudges.

“Well, I’ll be off then,” she says, giving him a light hug. “Thank you for a lovely evening.”

“Likewise,” he says, aiming for his most charming smile. “I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

He smooths further as he watches her retreating figure from the window—she’ll leave with fond memories but no desire to seek out either Charles or Raven ever again. After their years in the city, Oxford is full of people with gentle mental cues of this nature, though a few dozen didn’t earn such gentle treatment, like the pair of boys who cornered Raven the last time she drank in public. She’d been furious with him afterwards—the silent treatment had lasted nearly a fortnight. Neither of them ever apologized to the other.

Charles turns on the wireless in the kitchen and sets about making his own cup of tea, half listening to Khrushchev’s latest provocation as he sets the kettle on the burner. Raven enters the room in a noisy huff, blue again but still wearing the same black-and-white minidress, her radiated annoyance unabated.

“I hope you had a nice evening,” Charles says in the mildest tone he can manage. Raven glares at him and says nothing, reaching past his head to open a cupboard, her hand just shy of knocking him in the head. He inches away from her and busies himself with the teapot.

After a minute of uncomfortable silence, he’s itching to peek inside her mind. It’s a desire that’s come and gone over the years, but it pulls at him when he feels like their relationship is particularly strained. He tries again.

“Did you talk to anyone interesting at the pub?” he asks. “There was that tall fellow with the—”

She slams the cupboard shut. “I might be more inclined to give you a pass for last night’s behavior if it was the exception rather than the rule.”

He winces. “Raven—”

The kettle wails, and she reaches over to turn off the heat with an angry thud.

“Since you seem to have gaps in your memory, I’ll try to jog it, how’s that?”

Charles sits at the kitchen table, slumping downwards with a sigh. “Have at it.”

“Standard Charles behavior,” she says, holding up her index finger as if she’s going to tick off each point one by one. “First: introducing me, repeatedly, as your ‘baby sister.’”

“You _are _my—”

She holds up her entire hand with a glare. “There’s a way to tell people we’re siblings that doesn’t sound like you’re showing off your poodle.”

Charles makes a vague noise of protest. “That’s completely unfair.”

Raven pointedly ignores him. “Number two: scaring off ‘that tall fellow’ with adolescent horror stories.”

Charles buries his head in his hands. “I clearly have little to no memory of this, but I honestly do apologize—”

“Save it,” she snaps. “Number three: swooping in and plucking the _single _drink I had all night from my hands.”

“You know what can happen if you drink,” he says weakly. He feels like he’s on thin ice, but he also has a very clear memory of the last time she drank in public and slipped, and the split-second of extreme revulsion from the man she’d been talking to, before Charles pushed between them and artlessly wiped all memory of them both from his mind.

“All that, as I said, is a normal night in the life of Charles Xavier,” Raven says.

“Honestly, Raven—”

“And if that were all, I’d give you a pass,” she continues. “It was a special night, after all.”

Charles has a sinking feeling that she isn’t going to be as generous with point number four. “What did I do?”

“Do you remember the other guy? Close to your height, blond, horn-rimmed glasses.”

He sifts through the haziness of the night—Raven’s presence in his half-memories is murky at best, a blond shadow flitting in and out of the periphery—before ruefully shaking his head.

“We were having a perfectly innocent conversation,” she continues. “Until you came up and glared at him. Then he got this glazed look in his eyes and walked away without a word.”

“No,” Charles breathes. “I didn’t—”

“This from the man who constantly lectures me about losing control of my powers when I have even _one drop _of alcohol—”

“I cannot stress to you how sorry I am, Raven,” Charles says. He’s truly mortified—and equally concerned about what else he might have been doing with his telepathy in such a state.

“You’re always sorry, Charles!” She’s nearly shouting now. “But apologizing over and over again without ever really changing makes your words feel pretty fucking empty!”

It’s an uncomfortably close echo of the maxim that’s helped him manage a lifetime of telepathy: that people should not be judged by the things they think, but by the things they say and do. Peoples’ passing thoughts—even the vilest of them—rarely amount to much, if anything, in the physical world. It had taken him years, as a child, to truly understand that they way he perceived people—simultaneously trying to reconcile the things inside their heads with the often divergent things they said aloud—was wildly different from everyone else in the world.

When they were younger, from the day he first caught her in one of the kitchens to the day, five years later, that she declared him unwelcome in her head, everything had been so much simpler. If he didn’t know how to put something in words, he simply pushed thoughts and feelings and impressions at her; with some practice, she learned to do the same back at him.

He’d been inside the minds of everyone he’d ever known—his parents, his stepfather and stepbrother, his nanny and the household staff and the string of tutors that were bewildered by a small boy who seemed to know everything—but before Raven, he’d never been inside the mind of someone who _knew_. She was happy to play the guinea pig, as he pushed and prodded at his powers; he was more happy to have a friend, a real one, one that he could share everything with. Until he couldn’t anymore.

The last time they had fought about this, he admitted how hard it was to understand what she was thinking from the outside. That had somehow made her even angrier.

“Everyone else manages.” She’d nearly spat out the words. “Take a page out of your own book and try to act like a normal person. You make me go through the world like this—” She shifted to her blond form, roughly gesturing up and down her body, before shifting back to blue again. Charles threw up his hands in frustration.

“I don’t _make _you for the hell of it, Raven! Do you have any idea what they’d think if you—”

“Do you?” Raven had stood a little taller then, the point where he suspected she’d literally lengthened her spine an inch or two. “It’s all baseless speculation, isn’t it?”

He didn’t have proof, but it wasn’t baseless; every day he heard what men were thinking about her disguised form, alongside the things all sorts of people thought about anyone who looked even remotely different. He’d tried to explain as much, but she told him she didn’t want to hear another word about it, and slammed the door in his face.

They’re in nearly the same positions now, him wearily slumped at the kitchen table, her standing tall and enraged. Her face is flushed, casting the dark blue of her skin closer to purple.

“I truly am sorry, though,” he tries again, quieter. Her shoulders drop slightly, and she shakes her head and takes the seat opposite him.

“I know you mean it, Charles,” she says, looking him straight in the eye. “You always mean it. But how many times am I supposed to listen to you say it?”

*

His father had been a nuclear physicist. “A scientist,” they’d said, thinking Charles too young to understand the term. “He helps the government.”

At five, Charles had attempted to decipher his father’s work by peeking inside his mind. Some attempts were more successful than others. His father’s mind was one of his favorites, orderly and expansive at the same time, always making space for bigger calculations and bolder ideas. It whirled the fastest when his friends from the government would come for dinner. They’d gather in the parlor afterwards, the air thick with cigar smoke, their minds boisterous and sloppy.

His mother’s mind stood in sharp contrast—it was, for lack of a better word, flat. It got flatter in the evenings, especially when his father was away helping the government. Charles would later realize she was drinking most of the day, and at night, she often drank herself into a stupor. He felt foolish remembering his childhood conviction that he could do something, anything, to break her out of her downswings; half the time, she forgot he was even there.

When he was old enough to truly piece it all together, Charles realized that his father and his friends had been working to develop an atomic bomb. They’d left London for New York not because of the evacuation, as Charles had been told, but because his father was meant to help the Americans build weapons that would wipe out the Germans a thousand times over. But by the time the Manhattan Project was underway, Brian Xavier was dead—and both his research and his wife were in the hands of his business partner, who had the most unpleasant mind Charles had ever encountered.

There are many things Charles would ask his father, were he alive today—frank questions about foresight and culpability, for a start, as the U.S.-Soviet arms race hurtles forward. But as he’s grown older and pushed as hard as he can at the bounds of his telepathy, he’s come to accept that its scope might be limitless, and that nags at him. What would his father say, if Charles asked him what it was like to knowingly put such terrible destructive potential in the hands of a powerful few?

But his father is dead, as is his mother and the business partner, who, not long after his father’s death, became his stepfather. From the moment Charles had met Raven, they’d stood shoulder to shoulder; even after she’d booted him out of her mind, they’d operated in solidarity, the two of them against the world. Now they truly are alone in the world—only a handful of servants, most of them elderly now, share a knowledge of what went on in the house in Westchester—and Charles can’t help but feel that he’s losing his grasp on her, inch by inch.

“This the spot, guv?”

He’s shaken out of his musings by the driver’s question, which is accompanied by the man’s involuntary mental jolt of impatience. Charles quickly pulls out his wallet.

“Apologies, yes, thanks ever so much,” he says, handing the man what’s likely too much money as he scrambles out of the cab.

The café sits a few steps below street level in a tucked-away bit of Bloomsbury, on a narrow lane lined with antiquarian booksellers and print shops. “Neutral ground,” Franks had joked on the telephone, even after Charles had insisted he wouldn’t mind traveling all the way to Cambridge.

He identifies Franks by his mind, which is mostly preoccupied not with genetics or the conversation they are about to have, but with his travel route home from London. He’s a stout man with a thick grey mustache, and he radiates warmth as he rises to shake Charles’s hand.

“Dr. Xavier, then?” he asks with a broad smile.

“Dr. Franks,” Charles says. “A pleasure.”

“Alfred Hickman wanted to come down here with me,” Franks says as they take their seats. “He was a great friend of your father’s.”

“The name rings a bell…” Charles says, even though it’s only stirring the faintest recollection.

“I assured him he’d be seeing you soon enough in Cambridge!” Franks says with a laugh.

Charles can’t help the small, incredulous laugh that slips out. “You don’t find my work—”

“Too radical?” Franks cuts in. “Oh, it’s quite radical, no doubt about it. I don’t think there’s a geneticist in Britain who wouldn’t agree with me, including your examiners. But it’s _interesting_.”

“And ‘interesting’ somehow translates to a job offer?” Charles asks. He can’t keep the skepticism out of his voice, but a quick peek confirms that Franks is more intrigued than anything else, and truly does want to give him a fellowship.

A waitress drops off a teapot and a pair of cups and saucers, and Franks pours for both of them with his eyebrows raised. “The team that moved over from the Cavendish—calling the work ‘groundbreaking’ would be an extraordinary understatement, as I’m sure you’d agree.”

Charles nods as he adds milk to his cup and stirs. “Nobel talk, I imagine.”

“If not this year, then next,” Franks confirms. “My argument is: if the LMB want to continue to push this field forward, we need to include the theoretical. Even the wildly speculative.”

_Speculative_. The word tugs at something deep inside him, half guilty, half wary. He and Raven debated the question for ages when Charles was laying down the foundational arguments of his thesis: what he was presenting as somewhat unorthodox “speculation” was, in reality, firmly grounded in their lives—and, if his theories were correct, in their genetic makeup.

In some optimistic but half formed vision of the distant future, he imagines studying people like them openly, with consenting test subjects, and mutant scientists pursuing hypotheses based on their own powers. Raven agrees that there must be more of them, many more, because the odds of the two people in the world with special powers finding each other as children are extremely slim. But the path from that moment to the present day remains frustratingly hazy.

Franks’s mind is so open and enthusiastic that Charles decides to push him a bit. “Wildly?” he asks, keeping his tone light. Franks chuckles softly.

“I don’t mean that as an insult,” he says. “And I should remind you that I think your theoretical work is sound. It’s more of a problem when it pushes into the fanciful—you know, telekinesis, telepathy, that sort of thing.”

Charles smiles as he sips his tea. “You don’t think the human mind, through some combination of millions upon millions of genetic mutations, could be capable of telepathy?”

Franks lets out a bark of laughter. “It’s a brilliant thought, isn’t it! Imagine if you could read minds. I’m not sure I would want to know what people thought of me. ”

Charles has to channel every ounce of self-control to keep his expression neutral. “It’s hard to imagine, I’ll admit.”

“Come to Cambridge,” Franks says, and now there’s a slight bit of urgency in his tone. “We’ll give you space to continue your speculative work, as a side channel.”

The shape of the next decade stretches out before him: access to the finest lab in the world, filled with people literally defining the field of genetics. That nagging wariness lingers, sitting alongside the phrase “side channel,” but it’s too good an offer to pass up.

“So,” he says with a smile, extending his hand. Franks grasps it, shaking it vigorously. “When shall I hire the movers?”

*

“Raven!”

Charles is standing in a veritable sea of boxes, asking himself once again how they managed to accumulate so many useless things in just a handful of years in Oxford. Neither of them had the foresight to label any of the boxes, so for the past few days he’s been left hunting through a dozen of them every time he needs something specific.

She appears in the doorway in her natural form—utterly naked. He yelps and covers his eyes.

“What?” she asks, projecting impatience that he can read perfectly clearly without his telepathy.

“I’d ask if you misplaced the boxes with your clothes but I know that you’re perfectly capable of magicking them onto your body,” Charles says wearily.

“Now now, Charles, you know our powers are based in science, not magic,” Raven says in a frankly obnoxious imitation of his accent. “You can take your hand off your eyes.”

She’s in another one of her too-short mod dresses, clearly testing his patience, but all the relevant bits are covered and Charles sighs in relief.

“I was just wondering—”

“Honestly, with your reputation, it’s a bit hypocritical to blush at the human body,” Raven cuts in, folding her arms across her chest.

“You’re my _sister_,” Charles protests.

“Maybe it’s just that I’m _blue_,” she says, stomping into the room. “Normally I’d say you have _broad_ tastes”—she stretches out the word “broad”—“but I guess blue is a bridge too far.”

“What does this have to do with what I find attractive? Did I not just utter the words, ‘you’re my _sister’_?” Charles asks, throwing up his hands. “Come on, help me. I’m looking for the box with the highball glasses.”

“It’s three in the afternoon, Charles,” Raven says flatly.

Charles ignores her, opening the next box and finding a stash of teacups. “Close enough.”

He’d been making good progress unpacking when he found a bottle of top-shelf brandy that he didn’t remember purchasing or packing, and which seemed as good an excuse as any to crack it open. He pours generously while Ravel rifles through a stack of boxes in the corner.

He’s just about situated on the sofa, cup in hand and a depressingly dense paper for peer review in his lap, when Raven straightens and turns, glaring at him.

“Aren’t you going to keep unpacking?”

He holds up the stack of papers with a rueful smile. “I need to make some progress on this before tomorrow, I’m afraid.”

“And since I’ll be home all day, I can do all the unpacking?” she says, her eyebrows drawing together.

“Well, if you’ll be here anyway…” Charles trails off and takes a deliberately large sip of the brandy. It really is quite good.

“I might not be,” Raven shoots back. “I need to find a job here before too long.”

“Do you?” Charles says mildly. He can see in an instant that it’s the wrong thing to say.

“If I tell you I don’t want to go back to school for the hundredth time, will you finally listen to me?” she snaps. “Or will it take another hundred times?”

Charles sets the papers aside with a sigh. “You obviously don’t have to listen to me—”

“It’s funny how you say things like that without any sincerity whatsoever,” Raven cuts in.

“—but I think it might be worth putting back on the table,” he goes on. “Education is important.”

“Studying what?” Raven says, throwing up her hands. “What am I supposed to do with a degree? All I do is follow you around as you drag me from city to city.”

“That’s not true,” Charles says automatically.

He’s aware his protests don’t hold water, as he reviews the past decade. Raven had been as desperate as he was to leave the house in Westchester; when he was accepted to university at 16, he didn’t even ask her if she wanted to come, because he already knew the answer. Neither of them knew her true age—even then, with his rudimentary theories about their powers and the particular way hers manifested, he could tell she was developing more slowly than an ordinary person.

He’d occupied a sort of dual role as brother and guardian in their Harvard Square flat, altering a few minds to get Raven into a local school, which she’d grudgingly attended. She made friends easily but struggled academically, which was utterly foreign to Charles—he’d never been to a normal school, and had never had the opportunity to make friends in the ordinary ways, but between his lightning-fast mind and all that his powers encompassed, the work his tutors brought him was laughably easy. It was a longstanding point of friction between them, but for years he worked with Raven on her homework, learning patience to avoid sessions ending in tears.

When they moved to England she’d declared herself finished with school, something they still fought about on a semi-regular basis. Charles didn’t stop her when she started waitressing, even though he couldn’t see the point of it, making a pitiful wage in exchange for unending rudeness, if not outright leering. At the café where she’d been working for the past year, he’d had to promise to stop visiting, after Raven noticed his telepathic interference was scaring away many of her seedier customers.

Raven is looking at him impatiently, and she rolls her eyes. “I had friends in Oxford, you know, and a steady job, even if you didn’t think much of it,” she says. “How long did you spend considering that when you said yes to this fellowship?”

“You know you don’t need to work, Raven—”

“What should I do with my time, Charles?” She’s close to shouting now, and he winces and inches backwards into the sofa cushion. “Sit by the door and wait patiently for you to come home?”

“Stop,” Charles says, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “That’s not fair.”

“You’re right,” she snaps. “None of this is fair.”

She storms out of the room in cloud of furious emotion that’s so potent he can’t block it out.

He picks up the article again and tries to focus, but he can’t stop turning over the abysmal state of his relationship with his sister. He remembers their conversation from a few weeks prior, when she’d said, harshly but truthfully, that she was his only friend. His telepathy has always created a strange distance between him and other people—an ironic one, too, when he’s able to see what’s happening inside their heads better than anyone else.

Raven had been the exception, but now a different sort of distance sits between them, a bridge he doesn’t know how to cross. The simplest course of action is to continue to look out for her, but even that feels like it’s been pushed to the absolute limit.

He makes an admirable dent in the brandy as he slogs through the paper, whose author apparently worked hard to obscure the seeds of good ideas under a mountain of unwieldy prose. Raven doesn’t reappear at dinner time, nor by the time he gets ready for bed. He checks, quickly, to ensure another mind is nearby, carefully avoiding dipping into it. She’s still there, and he gets a flash of simmering rage before he withdraws.

In the morning, when Raven isn’t in the kitchen or the living room, he knocks on her bedroom door and receives no answer. He opens the door to find her bed empty and neatly made; her suitcase, along with a few personal items he knows she unpacked, are nowhere to be found.

Charles does a sweep through the house, but the only minds in a fifty-foot radius are the neighbors on either side, half asleep and puttering through their morning routines. He searches every room in the house, even the toilet, looking for a note, or a clue, or anything to suggest where she’s gone, or when she’ll be back. He comes up empty-handed.

Raven seems to have vanished just as suddenly as she appeared in his life that night nearly two decades ago.

He rings the lab and tells them he’s sick and won’t be in until tomorrow, absently giving a set of instructions for the assistants. He hangs up, and sinks onto the sofa in disbelief. It’s just past nine in the morning, but yesterday’s teacup is within reach, as is the bottle of brandy.


	4. Chapter 4

New York City is intoxicating.

Americans, Erik concedes, leave a lot to be desired—though half the people in this city weren’t born here, either—but he’s never been to a place with so much steel so densely packed. On afternoons when he’s tired of negotiating tactics with Emma and Azazel and Janos, he slips away and rides the IRT uptown and back down again, sinking into the feeling of all that metal surrounding him on every side, especially stacked up overhead.

When they’d first arrived in New York he’d lobbied hard for setting up their headquarters in a skyscraper, but Emma had insisted that since they were actually meant to live somewhere, not just lurk and plot, their base of operations should be somewhere a bit more residential. Her funds, her tastes; after a year of butting heads over every last detail, Erik was finally learning to choose his battles.

Gramercy has entirely too much brick for his liking, but he does take some small satisfaction in using his powers to get into the park without a key.

He opens the front door of the townhouse with a flick of his wrist and heads towards the back of the building. They’d only been here a few weeks when the kitchen naturally emerged as a sort of hub, so they set up a radio on one of the counters and overhauled the adjoining dining room. It’s a proper war room now, maps lining the walls and documents spread out across the gleaming oak table.

Angel is at the stove preparing breakfast, dressed in sweatpants and one of her standard backless shirts, gossamer-like wings tucked against her back. The radio announcer is making his way through the local news.

“Morning, boss,” she says, giving him an appraising nod as she folds eggs with a spatula.

“Good morning,” he says, maneuvering around her to pour a cup of coffee from the pot. “Have they left yet?”

“About an hour ago,” she confirms. “Emma says she’ll call later today.”

Emma, Azazel, and Janos were headed back to Europe on a big lead, giving Erik full reign of the New York house for the foreseeable future. They have a set of leads of their own, and the majority of the firepower. Aside from the original trio and himself, six other mutants were living in the house, and regardless of whether their powers were offensive or defensive, all of them were good in a fight.

Since he’d joined forces with Schmidt’s former team, they’d located—and in a few cases, liberated—close to three dozen mutants over the past year. A good portion of them would never serve much use—empathy without telepathy, unusual physical features that were purely cosmetic, the boy who faintly glowed in the dark, the young woman who could touch plants and make them grow faster. But then, most of them hadn’t wanted to leave their families; the team they were building was made up of people who didn’t have much else, whether or not they were looking for solidarity, or a cause.

They’d picked up Angel in Los Angeles in July. Emma’s range was limited, but if their combination of word of mouth, bribery, and Erik’s well-honed tracking skills could get them into the right places, she was happy to dig through every mind in a room to find the mutant in question. A circuitous trail had led them first to a gentlemen’s club and then to a private room with Angel, where Emma watched her coolly for a moment before shimmering into her diamond form. The slow look of smiling recognition, as Angel nodded and unfurled her wings, stuck with Erik for weeks afterwards.

“To international news now,” the radio announcer is saying. “In Riga, talks have broken down between Secretary McNamara and Soviet defense minister Rodion Malinovsky following President Kennedy’s latest declaration that the United States—”

“God, it’s too early for this,” Angel mutters, and Erik flicks the radio off with his powers. She hands him a plate of eggs and he thanks her as he takes a seat at the big, sturdy table in the center of the room. She sits across from him, carefully piling her eggs on a slice of toast.

“A report from the night shift,” she says, tapping two long fingernails on a handwritten note sitting on top of the morning paper. It’s an address in Midtown and a word: “mystique.”

“Cryptic,” he says dryly.

“Toad heard about it through reliable backchannels, and he did a little reconnaissance last night,” Angel says. “It’s a dinner club that has a few different singers every evening. But you’ll never guess what the bartender told him.”

Erik raises his eyebrows and makes a “go on” gesture.

“All the singers are actually the same girl,” Angel says with a satisfied smile.

“A shapeshifter?” Erik can’t keep the sincere interest out of his voice—the idea is fascinating in and of itself, but a power like that in their arsenal would be indispensable.

“How about we take in a show tonight?” Angel says with a sly smile.

Erik smiles in return. “I’ll pick you up at eight. Wear something nice.”

Angel gives him a near-pitying look. “Baby, everything is nice when I wear it.”

He spends most of the day holed up in the dining room, mainlining coffee and combing through a large stack of classified documents that Azazel snatched from police headquarters down on Centre Street a few nights prior. They have yet to find an official government document that acknowledges the existence of mutants—and they are all in agreement that this is a good thing—but as they’ve encountered more and more types of powers, they’ve been learning to read between the lines for any description that sounds vaguely promising.

By the time eight rolls around, he’s waiting in his sharpest suit at the foot of the stairs. Angel descends in a skintight red number, one of Emma’s white fur stoles masking her wings.

“Just so we’re clear, you’re paying,” she says, and he chuckles and extends an arm.

It’s an upscale club, with a polished marble bar curving around the side of the room, and the assembled crowd is boozy and jovial, pressing orders on waiters in white tuxedo jackets as they flutter between tables. They’re seated near the front, with a prime view of the stage, and Angel orders them a pair of martinis while Erik scans the room for vulnerable points.

“Relax, man,” Angel hisses. “She’s a singer, not an assassin.”

Erik shoots her a look as the band shuffles onstage, and then the house lights dim and the crowd starts cheering. The singer who walks onstage is petite and girlish, with an upturned nose and a heart-shaped face; she’s wearing a very short sequined dress, and her dark curls are pinned up with a jeweled fascinator that glints as it catches the spotlight.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” she says, ducking her head slightly as she offers up a bashful smile. Erik catches Angel’s gaze and she raises an eyebrow.

She’s a good singer, as far as Erik’s able to tell with these things, her voice high and clear. In between songs, she nails the small-town girl in the big city routine; as he scans the crowd, he can pinpoint exactly which men are drawn in by it.

“Well?” Angel says as the singer leaves the stage amidst a wall of applause.

“Well, what?” Erik asks, knocking back the last of his martini and sliding the olives off the stick. “I’m here to see if she’s truly a shapeshifter, not rate her skills as a performer.”

“You could loosen up a little, though,” Angel says with a teasing laugh, tapping a fingernail against the rim of her glass. “Figure out what _shape_ is your favorite.”

Erik frowns at her. “The last one didn’t seem particularly well-suited to fighting.”

She laughs loudly and shakes her head. “I swear to God,” she says when she pauses to take a breath. “I don’t know who programmed you in the lab but…” She trails off, her face falling. “I— I didn’t mean—”

“Never mind,” Erik says brusquely, not meeting her eyes as he flags down a waiter to order another round.

He has no idea what Emma’s told their recruits, though Angel’s fumble suggests that at least she knows something about Erik’s adolescence. They’ve all seen the tattoo on his forearm; he never hesitates to wear short sleeves, even after years of people stuttering mid-sentence when they catch sight of it.

He knows bits and pieces of Angel’s backstory, and while there’s no sense comparing their very different experiences, as far as he knows, her childhood was an unusually rough one. She’s been slow to trust—while she immediately agreed to join them, even months later she’s forever half eyeing the door, like she’s on the brink of skipping out on the whole project. He’s used those moments of hesitation to remind her what they’re doing: how strong they are, and how that strength should be wielded.

A few minutes pass, and they watch in silence as the band shuffles back onstage, until Angel clears her throat. “I just—”

“You think the next one will be blond?” he says, just a little too loudly, before she can launch into any sort of conversation about feelings.

She takes his cue as the waiter delivers their drinks, and raises her glass in a toast. “I’d prefer a redhead myself,” she says with a wink.

The lights dim again as the next singer saunters out, and the audience responds with equal parts applause and lewd cat-calls. Angel leans towards him. “Bingo!” she stage-whispers.

The woman is in fact a redhead, and an extremely voluptuous one at that, her deep blue gown clinging to every curve and leaving very little to the imagination. She looks nothing like the previous act. Erik cannot wait for the show to end so they can get her alone in a room.

“Hello, boys,” the redhead says, blowing kisses at a large and noticeably rowdy group of men at a table in the back. The voice, too, sounds wholly different; even to Erik’s untrained ear, he’d never mistake one woman for the other.

He watches her act impatiently, this one longer and full of a lot of leaning forward and posing, and after the final encore, he stands and walks over to the bar as the rest of the patrons file towards the exits.

“Last call was 20 minutes ago, pal,” the bartender says without looking up.

“I’d like a private word with the singer,” Erik says. He senses Angel approaching from behind by the clasp on her bracelet.

“Sorry, bud, but the show’s over, and she’s a busy lady.”

“Yes, so there’s just the one singer, then,” Erik says, and at this, the bartender looks up. “I believe the word I’m meant to say is ‘mystique’?”

“Ah.” The bartender puts down the glass he was cleaning. “You know the guy with the…?” He gestures vaguely at his face.

“Our associate,” Angel confirms.

Whether Toad bribed him, flattered him, or threatened him, they’ll never know, but the man simply nods and says, “Follow me.”

They’re led down a corridor far seedier than the patron-facing part of the club, with broken light fixtures and floors that haven’t seen a mop in years. They reach an unlabeled door and the bartender knocks once before shouting, “Mystique!” and pushing it open.

The dressing room is surprisingly sparse—not a single item of clothing in sight—and a girl with long blond hair is seated at a vanity, watching them in the mirror with a frown.

“What’s going on?” she asks. She, too, sounds completely different from both singers.

“I’ll leave you to it,” the bartender says, offering a vague waving gesture of what might be apology at the woman as he walks out the door. She spins and Erik catches her shift in body language immediately, defensive and alert.

“What do you want?” she asks, folding her arms across her chest.

“A little show-and-tell,” Angel says, and she wastes no time, dropping Emma’s stole to the floor and extending her wings to their full span. The woman’s mouth forms a perfect “o.”

“You…”

“Yes,” Erik says simply. There are a handful of objects he can sense on the vanity—a set of tweezers, the back of a hairbrush, a few coins. He floats them over, one by one, and then sets them rotating in a circle as if he were juggling.

The woman’s look of shock melts into a grin. “I _knew _it,” she says, almost to herself.

She stands, squares her shoulders, and begins to shift slowly, working upward, pink skin turning to deep blue scales. She has short red hair, wide yellow eyes, and she’s completely naked, blue from head to toe. She’s the most fascinating-looking mutant he’s ever seen.

“Mystique,” she says, holding out her hand. Erik takes it; she’s got an alarmingly strong grip.

Angel chuckles softly. “I told you I preferred redheads.”

*

In the first weeks of the new year, Erik starts to realize how much Mystique has altered the balance of power in the house. Emma is still in Europe, though she’s checking in less frequently with each passing month, and without her, their ability to pinpoint potential recruits is significantly hindered. Even with the addition of Mystique’s talents, they’re left doing far more legwork to be absolutely certain that a given target is a mutant.

Mystique is as changeable as her physical form, bubbly with childish enthusiasm at one moment, closed off and ruthless the next. Erik suspects that she is trying on different identities just as she tries on different skins. He prefers the merciless Mystique, of course, the one who’s determined to get things done, but he concedes that it doesn’t sit right on her, like a coat that’s a little too broad across the shoulders.

She tells him nothing about her past. He’s mildly curious; at the very least, he’d like to know how she revealed her talents to the club owner in the first place. That first night, they’d sat in her dressing room with a bottle of bourbon as she told them she was paid as a single performer, regardless of how many faces she put on every night. Six shows a week and she could barely afford a rat-trap of a walk-up deep in the Village; when they told her about the house, she was more than willing to move across town.

Mystique defers to him, but they’re not friends—colleagues, maybe, and when he realizes how poor a fighter she is despite her raw strength, coach and trainee. She and Angel are the ones who form a fast and close friendship, and by the end of February, as the snowbanks have taken on a permanent layer of grime and he’s starting to despise Manhattan as a result, he realizes that while he might once have thought of Angel as a friend, he’s come to think of both of them as his subordinates, a pair of trusted lieutenants, at his back but not his side. It’s better, this way. They have a lot to do.

Angel has never cared much for big-picture conversations—she prioritizes survival, on an individual level—but Mystique, Erik learns early on, has thought more broadly about mutants and their future. She hints at having known others like them before, though she’s tight-lipped on the subject.

“Threatening powers are one thing, but visible mutations?” Mystique says one afternoon, carrying her conversation with Angel up from the makeshift gym they’ve arranged in the basement. Erik has been at the kitchen table slogging through a packet of encrypted documents for an hour, and he puts down his pen, grateful for an excuse to set it aside.

“Good session?” he asks. Angel nods as she fills a glass of water and hands it to Mystique before filling another for herself.

“It was fine until Miss Mutant Separatist over here started lecturing me about the future,” she says with a snort. Mystique makes a noise of protest.

“I’m just saying that there’s no way I can walk down the street like this,” she says, gesturing to her blue scales. “I know how people who look different are treated.”

“Oh, so that’s why you go around disguised as a perky blond girl, huh?” Angel says. The tone is teasing, but there’s an edge to it, underneath.

Mystique rolls her eyes. “I can look however I want. Why not give myself an advantage?”

Angel puts her glass down forcefully on the counter. “Look, I get it, babe,” she says. “But you _could _stay blond for the rest of your life if you—”

“But I don’t—”

She’s cut off by the doorbell ringing, an unusual enough occurrence that Erik’s instantly on alert. It seems to be a single person at the door, accompanied by enough metal in specific places that it feels like some sort of uniform. If the visitor is carrying a weapon, it’s made of some other material.

“Wait here,” he instructs, ignoring their protests as he heads towards the front of the house.

He yanks open the door and there’s a teenage boy standing on their stoop, dressed in a messenger’s uniform and holding up a letter.

“What?” he snaps. The boy’s eyes widen.

“Sir,” he says shakily. “I’m looking for a Raven Darkholme.”

“You have the wrong address,” Erik says, moving to shut the door, but the boy holds up a hand.

“But it’s just that—the sender, he was pretty specific,” he says. “You’re absolutely certain—”

“That’s me. I’m Raven Darkholme.”

Mystique appears beside him, blond and fully clothed, her normally pink cheeks ashen. The boy places an envelope in her hand.

“Good afternoon, miss, sir,” he says, tipping his cap as he inches away, nearly stumbling backwards down the steps. Erik slams the door behind him.

“Raven Darkholme?” Angel says, her hands on her hips.

“A previous life,” Mystique says, attempting one of the weaker forced smiles Erik has ever seen. “One in which my brother, the only person on the planet who could have sent this, played a starring role.”

“You have a brother?” Erik asks.

“You gave your brother this address?” Angel asks at the same time.

“I didn’t need to give it to him,” Mystique says with a sigh, shifting back to her natural form. She slides a fingernail under the envelope’s seal; the paper is thick and expensive-looking.

“How did he get it, then?” Erik asks. She ignores him as she reads the letter, frown growing deeper. She folds it carefully and slides it back in the envelope.

“He’s in New York,” she says. “And he’s giving a lecture tonight. He’d like to see me.”

“Do you _want _to see him?” Angel asks, stepping forward and placing a hand on Mystique’s forearm. “He can’t force you, you know.”

Mystique gives a rueful laugh. “Well, technically he could,” she says. “But I’ll go.” She looks up at Erik. “You should come, too. The subject of his lecture is the future of genetic mutation.”

*

Mystique is largely silent as they travel uptown. It’s just the two of them; Angel had begged off, saying she had no interest in setting foot in a classroom ever again. Erik watches Mystique on the train, blond and sullen. He’s brimming with curiosity, but he’s also annoyed—she’s lived under his roof for months and has never once mentioned this brother, a man who apparently has enough expertise in genetics to fly around the world giving lectures on the subject.

The campus is a strange oasis amongst the press of Manhattan buildings, with carefully trimmed stretches of green lawn and neat rows of trees offering up the first hints of springtime buds.

“Your brother,” Erik tries again as they climb the wide marble steps to the building where the lecture is being held. “He’s a mutant?”

“Yes,” Mystique says. He waits a beat, but she doesn’t say anything more.

They’re just in time, slipping into seats in the back row of the lecture hall; a man with a shock of white hair and a perfunctory elbow-patched tweed jacket is standing at a lectern, reading from a set of index cards.

“—and he might speak about his work at Cambridge as well. So without further ado, it’s my great pleasure to welcome Dr. Charles Xavier.”

The man who crosses the stage amongst the wave of applause is immediately striking—fair-skinned and dark-haired, compactly built and dressed in a well-cut three-piece suit. He smiles broadly as he takes his place at the lectern, looking out at the crowd. His eyes rest for a moment on the back corner where they’re sitting, but he doesn’t look surprised.

Erik leans over to whisper, “Is your brother also a shapeshifter?” Mystique shakes her head.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Rush, thank you so much for inviting me to New York,” he says. “I’m actually from just a bit north of here, though you’d never guess it from the accent.” The audience chuckles as Erik leans back towards Mystique.

“Your brother is _British_?” he hisses. She elbows him in the ribs, hard.

“I’m happy to answer any questions about the work the LMB are doing, including my lab in particular,” Xavier says. “But I’m mostly here to talk about something a little more abstract. Less about genetic realities—and more about genetic _possibilities_.”

Erik’s breath catches and he leans forward slightly, and for just a moment, Xavier locks eyes with him. It feels as if someone’s snagged him at the very center of his core, and tugged.

Xavier launches into a lecture that’s a hair too technical for Erik to fully comprehend—understandable, given the venue, but he listens as carefully as he can anyway. Xavier is extremely animated as he speaks, filling up more space than seems physically possible.

The lecture presents the idea of extreme genetic mutations—a major leap in human evolution, rather than incremental change—as an intriguing hypothetical, but Erik can see the careful way he’s dressing up reality with the language of speculation. Every so often his gaze drifts up to the back corner. Mystique remains still, arms crossed, at his side.

“If the gene—or perhaps the gene cluster—were dominant, and distributed randomly, one could envision those numbers increasing rapidly within only a few generations,” Xavier says. “The question then remains: What of the people who evolve first?” He takes a sip of water with a smile. “I’ll pause here for questions.”

An older man in the second row stands and clears his throat. “Dr. Xavier,” he says. “I think I speak for everyone in this room when I say this thought experiment is a fascinating one. But these potential _mutations_, if that’s not too mild a word…”

Xavier smiles indulgently. “The sky’s the limit, I say. It’s a thought experiment, after all.”

“So take the wildly implausible, then. Imagine a man who shoots bullets from his fingers,” the questioner continues. “Or someone who can walk through walls. People who have abilities that don’t just give them advantages in life, but make them dangerous. What you’re proposing will inherently lead to a breakdown in our societal structures.”

“Well,” Xavier says, cocking his head like he’s been presented with a riddle. “If I were to own a gun—_now _we’re talking extreme hypotheticals…” He chuckles ruefully, and the audience laughs. “_If _I were to own a gun, wouldn’t I be just as dangerous as the man who shoots bullets from his fingers?”

“I don’t—” the man tries to cut in, but Xavier holds up a hand.

“Both he and I could choose to use it, or choose not to use it,” he says. “If he were like me, temperamentally, he’d make sure he never fired a shot. We’re surrounded by advantageous mutations—people who possess a natural physical strength, for example, that you or I could never match. Those men don’t go around strangling people to death just because they can.”

“But owning a gun is different than _being _a gun,” the man counters. “Potential for accidents aside—wouldn’t you agree that greater power offers greater temptation to misuse it?”

Xavier narrows his eyes. “Perhaps,” he says slowly. “I suppose my response is simply that I choose to take a less pessimistic view of humanity.” He claps his hands together. “And this is devolving into a philosophical debate, which is not why you flew me across the ocean. Let me tell you about some of the practical applications for all this speculation.”

As the talk turns technical again, Erik only half listens, his mind whirring. Xavier’s words rattle around in his head—“_those numbers increasing rapidly within only a few generations_.”

He’s spent the past year seeking out mutants with only the vaguest sense of a plan; they’ve been building an army before they even knew who they’d need to fight. But the future Xavier is laying out—and the assumptions of his questioner in the second row—shifts it all into focus. They are the evolutionary leap forward, and those left behind will surely fight their own extinction.

Of course, Xavier isn’t arguing that they take up the fight, preemptively or otherwise. His opinions, along with his references to pacifism, are impossibly naïve. It’s as if he’s asked all the right questions and drawn all the wrong conclusions.

“—but I’m hopeful about the work my colleagues are doing on that front,” Xavier is saying. He glances towards the front row and nods. “And I’m getting the signal that my time is up, I’m afraid. But let’s please continue the discussion—and thank you very much for your attention.”

Over the applause, Erik leans towards Mystique. “You’ll introduce us.”

She glares at him. “I haven’t decided if I—”

Erik rolls his eyes. “You came all the way here, you don’t get to turn around and run now.”

“He may seem charming on the surface, but you don’t know _anything _about him,” Mystique says churlishly.

He grabs her by the arm and hauls her upwards. “Put your sibling rivalry aside and stop acting like a child.”

“It’s not—_ugh_.” Mystique shoves him off roughly. “You’re as bad as he is. I already know I’m going to regret putting you in the same room together.”

She stomps down the stairs towards her brother, who is surrounded by a group of stuffy-looking academics peppering him with questions. Up close, Erik can tell Xavier is a good head shorter than he is. When he looks past the group and catches sight of them, his face lights up; his eyes are startlingly blue.

“Pardon me for a moment, gentlemen,” he says, pushing past the assembled group.

He and Mystique stare at each other for a beat, then another, before something seems to break. She moves first, all but launching herself at him, hugging him tightly. He grips her back just as tightly, whispering something in her ear. Erik looks away, feeling distinctly like he’s intruding on something both significant and intensely private.

They pull apart, and Mystique steps back until she’s standing between them.

“Charles, this is Erik Lehnsherr, my…” She turns to Erik, wrinkling her nose.

“Housemate?” he supplies.

“Boss,” she says simultaneously.

Xavier looks between them with a bemused expression on his face, but he quickly smooths it away with a polite smile. “Charles Xavier,” he says, extending his hand. Erik takes it. His hands are sturdy and square, his palm smooth and cool against Erik’s own.

Eventually Mystique clears her throat, and Erik quickly withdraws his hand.

“Charles,” she says, just slightly too loudly. “How long are you in town for?”

“I haven’t booked a return ticket yet, actually,” Xavier says. “I’m planning on going up to check on the house while I’m within striking distance.”

“The house?” Erik asks.

Xavier furrows his brow. “In Westchester. Where we grew up?” His tone suggests that this is something Erik ought to know. Erik would know, he supposes, if Mystique had told him anything at all about herself or her past, like her British mutant brother with a doctorate in genetics and the bluest eyes he’s ever seen.

Xavier coughs lightly, and there’s a faint hint of a blush creeping across his cheekbones. “Erik—I gather you enjoyed the speech?”

“A great deal,” Erik says. He leans in slightly and lowers his voice as he says, “You know I’m a—”

“Yes,” Xavier says quickly, and when Erik looks sharply at Mystique, she holds up her hands in protest.

“I didn’t say a thing,” she says firmly.

_She didn’t need to_.

He starts at the voice in his head, and Xavier smiles apologetically.

_Though I’m not the first telepath you’ve met_.

“Are you all this invasive?” Erik says aloud. Xavier frowns.

“I apologize, my friend,” he says. “I try not to dig too deeply unless absolutely necessary.”

“At least you’re sorry,” Erik says with a sigh. “That’s more than I can say for Emma.”

“I’d love to meet her when she returns,” Xavier says, and then seems to realize that was more information than he was explicitly given. He shakes his head. “I’m so sorry. Again.”

“Stop apologizing,” Erik says, a smile tugging at his lips.

Xavier brightens, smiling in return; his lips are unusually full, and unusually red. The blush returns as he says, “I must thank you then, I—”

“God, just stop _talking_, both of you,” Mystique cuts in with a moan. “Should I leave? Maybe meet you back at the house, Erik?”

Erik ignores her. “Your talk,” he says. “It was fascinating, though I don’t see how you come to the conclusions you do.”

The smile slips from Xavier’s face. “How so?”

“I imagine that beneath your speculation you have real evidence-based estimates for the mutant population, both now and in the decades to come?”

Xavier nods. “I believe our numbers are in the thousands now, but if my research is correct, that will mean millions of mutants—or at least people with the mutant gene, as it were—will be born by the turn of the millennium.”

“But what of the next half century?” Erik asks, taking a small step forward. Xavier’s frown deepens. “We’re already here. Do you think the average person will just smile and accept that we are the future of the human race? That they won’t put up a fight?”

“I don’t think it will come to that,” Xavier says, shaking his head. “We hold all the cards right now. Most, if not all, mutants are living in secret, concealing their powers. We can introduce the idea incrementally, lay the right foundations, and if we—”

“And how long will that take?” Erik says dismissively. “My lifetime? Yours?”

“This is the future of our species,” Xavier says, taking a step forward himself and squaring his shoulders; this close, Erik all but looms over him. “If that’s what it takes, then I don’t see why—”

“But if we’re the future of human evolution, then why should we have to hide?”

“Erik!” Mystique hisses. “Lower your voice.”

He realizes he’s been close to shouting, but as he glances quickly at the remaining cluster of academics, talking enthusiastically amongst themselves, they don’t seem to have noticed. In fact, they barely seem to be aware that the three of them are still in the room.

Xavier is staring at him, his eyes bright. “Yes, I’ve distracted them,” he says without breaking eye contact. “I should release them—we’re meant to go to dinner. But—” He takes a slight step back and turns to Mystique, reaching out as if he’s going to take her hand, and then thinking better of it. “Come to my hotel, tomorrow. I’d love to see you properly.” He looks back at Erik. “Both of you. If you’re free, that is. I’m at the Plaza.”

Erik raises his eyebrows and shoots Mystique a look, but she’s wholly focused on her brother.

“Late morning, how’s that?” she asks quietly. He nods, and she leans in and kisses him on the cheek. “Good night, Charles.” She pulls back and is headed up the stairs of the lecture hall before he can say a word in return.

“Should I…” Erik looks up at her and back to Xavier. “I can leave you two to work out your…”

“No!” Xavier says quickly, and then looks slightly chagrined. “I mean, please come as well. We can continue our debate.” He holds out his hand once more, and Erik takes it.

“How long until I can convince you that you’re wrong?” Erik asks.

Xavier laughs. “You’ll keep trying, I suspect.”

They stand there for a moment, hand in hand, before Xavier pulls back. “Until tomorrow then,” he says.

“Tomorrow,” Erik repeats, turning to leave.

“Oh, and Erik?”

Erik turns back, raising a questioning eyebrow.

“Please try to think of me as Charles,” he says with a hint of a grin. “Inside your head.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art is once again by **[araydre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/araydre)** and FYI this one led me to say “WOW” out loud, repeatedly, so araydre, thank you. <3

Charles is up before dawn. He’s only been in New York for 36 hours, too soon to adjust to the time difference, but he takes advantage of the early start, placing a series of calls just after breakfast. Aside from a trip to the house, he arranges to meet with the family solicitor, as well as the brokerage firm keeping an eye on most of the accounts; someone’s had to, as he’s spent the past decade trying hard to pretend everything on this side of the Atlantic doesn’t exist.

He’d wondered if Raven would make her way back here when she left without even a hint of her plans all those months ago. She has a new name now—inside Erik’s head, he only knew her as “Mystique”—but the blond figure she wore last night was her same default disguise. Charles knows as well as anyone how hard it is to shake old habits.

Inside Erik’s head… He’s still circling around the beauty of Erik’s mind, the precision of it, the singular focus, and above all, the depth of feeling, especially as he got increasingly heated while they argued. He’d lingered over Erik’s mind all through dinner, even when Hayes had pushed the limits of his patience and once again picked up the case of the hypothetical bullet-fingered mutant who just couldn’t help but become a mass murderer.

He remembers, with a flash of guilt, that Raven is coming this morning as well—that she is, in fact, the reason he extended the invitation in the first place. But it’s harder to think about her, when he doesn’t have the slightest clue how to fix what’s broken between them.

They arrive just after eleven. Raven’s wearing her standard blond form, and she greets him with a quick, nervous hug. Erik shakes his hand again; his expression is inscrutable, though his mind is alight with anticipation.

“Please, come in,” Charles says, gesturing to the sitting area. Once he shuts the door, Raven shifts to her natural form—wearing the same outfit, thankfully—and heads for the sofa. Erik hangs back, taking in the room with a look that’s somewhere between confusion and skepticism.

“Are you billing your employer for this?” he asks, eyeing the ornate chandelier over their heads. Charles lets out a slightly self-conscious laugh.

“Goodness, no,” he says quickly. “Columbia wanted to put me up in faculty housing, which was very kind of them, of course, but as I was going to stay in town for a few days…”

He doesn’t need to read Erik’s mind to see the mental calculations he’s performing, estimating the cost of a night in this suite as he looks back and forth between Charles and Raven.

“Anyway,” he says briskly, clasping his hands together. “Shall we call up for anything? Tea? Champagne?”

“Do you actually feel like celebrating, Charles?” Raven says flatly.

Charles crosses the room and takes a seat across from her with a sigh. Erik is pointedly declining to join them, walking over to the fireplace and studying the cloisonné inlay on a vase with what looks like more interest than he likely holds.

“Please, let’s not fight,” Charles says, looking at Raven imploringly. “I haven’t seen you in nearly a year.”

Raven folds her arms across her chest. “Temporary truce?”

“I’d like to figure out a way to make it permanent, if I’m honest,” Charles says. He’s grateful when Raven cracks the faintest smile in response.

“Don’t push your luck,” she says.

Raven studies him for a moment, and he works very hard to avoid using his powers, even just a little bit. He’s made no such promise to Erik, and while he’s keeping his word not to dig too deeply, he lets his telepathy skirt over Erik’s mind. He’s on guard—Charles can tell, from the shape of his thoughts, that he is constantly on guard—but there’s an itching current running underneath, one that’s urging Charles and Raven to hurry and kiss and make up, so they can move on to more important things.

He steals a quick glance over to the mantel Erik is standing in front of, his back to them; he is a study in long, crisp lines in his neat leather jacket and pressed grey slacks. Charles looks back to Raven, who’s still watching him; her eyes narrow. He clears his throat loudly.

“Tell me what you’ve been doing here in New York,” he says. “Surely something more exciting than working too many hours in a lab.”

Raven casts a quick glance at Erik, who’s turned to watch them. “We’re…”

“Recruiting,” Erik says. “Mutants, that is. We have a group living in a house a ways downtown. Mystique joined the cause a few months ago, and her talents have been invaluable.”

Raven preens at that, but Charles finds himself frowning as he glances between them.

“And what is the _cause_, exactly?” he says, carefully choosing to ignore Raven’s frankly ridiculous new name, lest he say as much out loud and cause her to storm out of his life once more.

“We’re training,” Raven says. “Erik’s been teaching me hand-to-hand combat.”

Charles raises an eyebrow. His sister’s power has always been overtly physical—she knows the human body as well as he knows the human mind—but for all her fits of temper, she’s never been a particularly violent person. “And who are you planning on fighting?” he asks lightly.

Erik makes a noise of derision and steps closer to the sitting area, his hands on his hips.

“You truly can’t see what lies before us, can you?” He’s radiating a jumble of emotions—frustration, curiosity, disgust, and underneath it, interestingly, some degree of protectiveness towards Charles specifically—and he’s thinking, loudly, about how strange it is that someone who seems so smart could be so extraordinarily naïve.

Charles bites back a retort to the thoughts he’s not supposed to overhear and decides to aim for a placating tone. “You’re right—I can’t predict the future,” he concedes. “But then, neither can you.”

“I already know how people treat those who they see as other,” Erik says with a gesture that slices through the air for emphasis. “Now imagine that other with actual superhuman powers.” Charles feels a tug at his wrist, and realizes Erik is yanking his arm upward by his wristwatch.

He knows, from the dive into Erik’s mind last night, exactly what’s shaped his opinions on the matter—and he’d be hard-pressed to blame Erik for a deeply pessimistic view of humanity. But at the same time, he cannot imagine that the world has learned nothing from the war, and he refuses to believe that the march towards another one is inevitable.

“Point taken, and I’ll take my arm back as well, please,” he says with a smile. The corners of Erik’s mouth turn up slightly as he gently lowers Charles’s wrist back to the armrest.

“You’ll give me credit for having some sense of how people tend to see the world,” Charles continues, tapping his temple lightly. “But it almost seems as if you’d welcome conflict—”

“I would,” Raven says, lifting her chin.

Charles looks at her sharply, and she’s gazing back at him with a defiant expression on her face. He realizes, as something twists in his stomach, that even through all their fights, even in the past ten months—when he had no idea where his sister was, if she was safe, or even alive—he’s never felt as distant from her as he does now.

“Would you, Raven? Truly?” he asks. “Based on my calculations, there aren’t nearly enough mutants around the globe to win a fight against even a small nation’s army. And yet you’re hell-bent on tearing down the world—”

“A world in which I have to live in hiding!” Raven cuts in. She’s close to shouting, her yellow eyes flashing. “You’ve never had any idea what it’s like to hide, what it feels like to do this day in and day out—and you haven’t changed a bit.”

“Raven, if you’d only—”

“Save it, Charles.” She stands and marches towards the door, shifting back to her blond form as she goes. “Real great catching up,” she calls over her shoulder, and slams the door as she exits.

“Did you put all of that in her head?” he asks, pinching the bridge of his nose. He’s fully aware it’s an incendiary question—that Erik might follow Raven’s lead and slam the door behind him.

But Erik only chuckles, and he moves to take the seat that Raven vacated. “I think _you_ put all that in her head,” he says. “Or rather, you gave her something against which she could form an opposite set of beliefs.”

“Excuse me?” Charles says, pulling his hand from his face and glaring at Erik. “Are you suggesting I drove my sister to a life of bloodlust?”

“I wouldn’t claim to have any idea what goes on in her head,” Erik says. “For that matter, none of us knew she even had a brother until yesterday. All I know is when we found her in that club, she seemed to have pretty clearly formed ideas about the human race.”

“Club? What club?”

“Never mind,” Erik says, waving a hand dismissively. “I must admit, I don’t know the exact circumstances of your estrangement, but that wasn’t quite the heartfelt reunion I was expecting.”

“I’m just trying to protect her,” Charles says wearily. “Even if I condoned violence—I don’t, for the record—”

“Yes, I’ve gathered,” Erik says, rolling his eyes, though there’s a hint of amused fondness in his tone, too.

Charles sighs. “Marching about, looking for trouble…she’s going to get herself killed.”

“Do you want my honest assessment?” Erik asks.

Charles nods, leaning forward slightly.

“Don’t dismiss this out of hand,” Erik says. “But I suspect that she never needed as much protection as you thought she did—”

“I’m sorry, but you don’t know what goes on inside peoples’ heads,” Charles cuts in.

“Trust me,” Erik says flatly. “I can imagine.”

Charles sits back with a huff. He knows, on some level, that Erik is right; at the same time, he can’t understand why she’s utterly unable to see why he worries, or why he’d want to protect his own sister—instead, everything’s been a battle, for years now, combative at every turn.

“Can I ask you something?” Erik cuts through his thoughts, and Charles looks up and meets his gaze. His eyes are a clear grey-blue, and there’s something about the steadiness of his gaze that knocks Charles slightly off-kilter. He swallows and gestures for Erik to continue.

“Your work—you’re studying this sort of mutation, at a molecular level?”

“Yes and no,” Charles says slowly. “The only mutant I’m studying at the moment is myself. Most of my work is theoretical, though I hope, in time, that I’ll have other willing test subjects.”

A dark wave of alarm shudders through Erik’s mind, so loudly that Charles can’t help but hear it, and he holds up a placating hand. “I know you must have bad associations with the phrase—”

“What do you know about my…_associations_?” Erik says, his tone as stormy as the jumble of emotions floating at the top of his mind.

Charles taps his fingers against his temple as a sort of apologetic gesture. “I’m sorry, my friend. I wasn’t rooting around in there, I swear, it’s just—”

“_Telepaths_,” Erik mutters.

Charles knows it’s wildly inappropriate, but a laugh slips out, and Erik looks at him sharply.

“I’m not laughing at you, I swear,” Charles says, holding up his hands in mock-surrender. “It’s just quite novel for me to think of myself as a part of a group. Of telepaths!”

Erik seems to smile in spite of himself. “It was a revelation, I’ll admit. Learning I wasn’t the only one who could do such unusual things.” He pauses and adds, “That I wasn’t alone.”

Charles cocks his head slightly. “It was the other telepath that you met first? Emma?”

Erik nods. “Perhaps things would have gone differently if it’d been someone else. But for all of her faults—and trust me, she has plenty—Emma’s been a good ally.”

Charles thinks, momentarily, of the extraordinary loneliness of the past year; for all of their differences, until the day that Raven left, he’d had another mutant by his side since he was ten years old. His colleagues are brilliant, even if they run the gamut from affable to egotistical blowhard, and he’s had no shortage of companionship, but telepathy has been his—and only his—secret to keep for the first time in nearly two decades.

“Is that what you’re doing, with your recruiting?” Charles asks. “Looking for other…allies?”

“There’s no need to be coy. I’m building an army,” Erik says bluntly. “We need to unite if we’re to defeat the threat that’s surely coming.”

“And what of the mutants who aren’t good in a fight?”

Erik frowns. “We’ll protect them, of course. When the time comes.”

Charles makes a sort of humming noise, but he says nothing. He understands the need for self-defense, but all the same, there must be something more in their collective future than fighting. Of course, he concedes, mired in the theoretical, he’s not offering any alternative paths.

As if Erik is the telepath, he leans forward slightly and says, “But what are you doing, locked up in a lab? Last night you painted a hypothetical world in which there was far more work to be done than mere scientific study—and theoretical study at that.”

Even though his thoughts were running on parallel lines, Charles bristles a bit. “I’ll thank you not to dismiss my work as theoretical only.”

“I was only repeating—”

“I know, I know.” Charles sighs and leans back in his chair, crossing his legs. “We’re in agreement that people fear what they don’t understand, but we’ll never help them understand if we aren’t able to truly explain what’s happening on a genetic level.”

“And when they learn that we’re the next stage in human evolution?” Erik asks, eyes bright. “No amount of understanding will make that palatable. They’ll fight their own extinction.”

“We’re not a different species,” Charles says with a frown. “And we can’t just remake the world. We all have to live in it—together.”

Erik seems to be inching closer to him, despite the coffee table separating them, and he fixes Charles with a penetrating stare. “You’re infuriating, do you know that?”

Charles laughs. “Somehow that doesn’t sound like an insult, when you say it.”

“It’s not meant to be.”

He can’t resist: he skims just past the surface of Erik’s mind, and finds no trace of the earlier anger and annoyance—all he can sense is that singular focus, pointed squarely at him. It leaves him slightly breathless. Erik smiles again, and it grows wider, into something more predatory.

He coughs lightly and looks away, feeling warmth creeping up the back of his neck. “You’re sure you don’t need to get back to—”

“No,” Erik says firmly. “My day is free and clear.”

Charles looks up at that, and meets Erik’s gaze. If he were a better judge of body language, he wouldn’t need to peek—but then again, he _has_ the ability to peek. He pushes past the surface ever so slightly, like lifting up the corner of a rug, and looks.

“Well,” he says, matching Erik’s smile and infusing it with the confidence of _knowing_. “If we’ve got the afternoon, then you must let me take you to lunch.”

*

Though Raven would likely say otherwise, Charles’s love life over the past decade hasn’t been limited to a parade of meaningless one-night stands. Certainly, he’d grant this hypothetical Raven, there’s more truth to that suggestion than not, but it hasn’t all been pick-up lines at pubs.

Well, perhaps it mostly has been. He wouldn’t call it a fear of commitment, precisely, but he vastly prefers the ease of a relatively anonymous evening, telepathy buttoned up as best he can.

There have been a few men over the years, though by and large, he’s mostly slept with women; those occasional dalliances have been, by necessity, far more discrete. It’s often struck him as funny, the secrecy of it all, given how often people think about it, as he skirts over random minds from day to day. He’s never discussed it with Raven; by the time he realized as much about his own preferences, she’d already banned him from his head. It’s cowardly, but without even a hint of how she might react, he’s never been willing to risk her judgment.

Yesterday afternoon he and Erik had been standing on 59th Street after a lengthy lunch, shaking hands for far longer than was likely appropriate, when Charles’s mouth, wholly disconnected from his brain, blurted, “Let’s have dinner tomorrow.” Erik had agreed without a second’s without hesitation.

This, Charles thinks, must be infatuation. He’s seen it in other peoples’ minds—even felt it, in his secondhand way, where the emotions seem just as real as if they were his own, but with that nagging undercurrent that he’s merely along for the ride.

But Erik’s been in his head, taking up entirely too much space, for the past 24 hours, from yesterday evening through the morning’s relatively dry meeting at his solicitor’s office; thankfully, they hadn’t needed much more from him than a procession of signatures.

He’s thought of their lunch—a journey from one argument to the next—and he’s thought of the shape of Erik’s hands, the sharp line of his jaw, the way his eyes lit up in tandem with his mind when he was truly incensed about something Charles was saying. He’s thought about the intoxication of going inside Erik’s head—with the full knowledge that Erik knows he’s there.

“Excuse me? Dr. Xavier?”

He’s startled out of his meditation on the span of Erik’s shoulders to see his broker frowning across the massive mahogany desk.

“My apologies, I drifted away for a moment,” Charles says. “What were we discussing?”

“The climate for investing, Dr. Xavier,” Willets says patiently, though a quick skim of his mind reveals just how adept he is at not letting the full extent of his frustration show on his face—probably an invaluable asset in a business like this.

“Yes, of course,” Charles says quickly. “What do you recommend?”

“If the president carries on like this, the markets will grow volatile,” Willets says. He’s now thinking less-than-flattering thoughts about Kennedy, though they lean more towards personal distaste than worry over geopolitical tension. “I’d recommend prudence, first and foremost.”

“Absolutely, I have complete faith in your judgment,” Charles says with a smile. He stands and extends a hand. “We’re finished, yes?”

Willets is aiming his mental disdain at Charles himself now, wishing he were even remotely interested in what his money was doing, but his face doesn’t give a single bit of it away. “Of course,” he says, showing off a row of pristine white teeth as he shakes Charles’s hand. “Have a safe journey back to England.”

He hasn’t booked a flight home. As his cab crawls through rush-hour traffic heading uptown, he muses over the coming days—what’s waiting for him back in Cambridge, and what’s potentially keeping him here. Erik’s prodding rattles around in his mind: scientific inquiry is important, but Charles knows that it’s just the foundation of the much larger battle they need to fight.

An ideological battle, that is. The thought only leads him to Raven, and the memory of her eyes flashing as she announced that she’d welcome a violent struggle.

By the time the cab pulls up in front of La Caravalle’s nondescript awning, traffic has left him nearly ten minutes late. He feels only a pinch of guilt as he borrows the coat attendant’s eyes for a quick once-over of his appearance; his cheeks are flushed pink but he looks presentable enough, though he runs a perfunctory hand through his hair and straightens his suit jacket.

Erik is already seated. He’s in a sharply-cut grey suit, and he makes a striking picture against the long mural done up in soft pastels behind him. He catches sight of Charles and the corners of his mouth turn upwards.

“I suspected you wouldn’t be the punctual type,” Erik says. There’s no annoyance lacing his thoughts, just amusement.

“I’m terribly sorry,” Charles says, unbuttoning his suit jacket as he takes the opposite seat. “Traffic was dreadful.”

Erik waves a hand dismissively. “I ordered a bottle of wine.” He glances around the packed restaurant with both eyebrows raised. “Between this place and that hotel suite I have pretty conclusive evidence that you have more money than you know what to do with.”

Charles flushes and lets out a half-laugh as he reaches for his water glass. “Yes, well.” He can only imagine how Erik would react if he were to see the house in Westchester.

“The thing I’ve been puzzling over, then,” Erik says. “Is why your sister was living in such a dump when we met.”

“Ah,” Charles says. The waiter arrives and presents the bottle to Erik, who nods absently and gestures for him to pour. “That’s likely because on paper, she doesn’t…exist. She wouldn’t have had a way to access any of the accounts. I suppose she could have impersonated me, but…”

Erik looks at him questioningly. Charles glances briefly at the waiter before muddling his mind with a light bit of distraction.

“Raven and I aren’t biologically related,” he tells Erik. “She showed up one night when I was about ten, stealing from our kitchens. She’s always been tight-lipped about her early years, but I know that her parents abandoned her when she was very young.”

“So you…” Erik’s brow furrows. He catches a flash of anger—Erik is thinking very uncharitable thoughts about Raven’s parents, and Charles can’t blame him. As a rule, he finds it harder to hang onto anger than most, but he’s long held similar feelings about his sister’s birth family.

“She’d probably say that I ‘kept’ her or some other nonsense,” Charles says with a sigh, taking a sip of wine. “I was an only child—well, I had been, until my new stepfather arrived with his son, but for all intents and purposes… Anyway, when I asked her to stay, she agreed. And then I made everyone in the house believe that she’d always been my sister.”

Erik’s mouth falls open slightly. “You had that kind of power when you were ten?”

Charles winces internally, because surely this won’t win him any affection, but when he meets Erik’s gaze, Erik’s looking at him with an expression he can only describe as hungry.

“Yes,” he says slowly. “When I went to university, I took her with me. I was sixteen—we’ve never known her exact birthdate, but she’s a few years younger. I put her in school and convinced everyone we met that I was a perfectly normal choice for a guardian. And the rest…” He shrugs. “We moved to England, and eventually she left, and now she can’t stand to be in the same room as me.”

“So you just altered reality, for everyone, at every turn, to suit your needs?” Erik raises an eyebrow. “For years on end?”

Charles frowns. “It wasn’t without cause—”

“You…” Erik is staring at him, eyes wide. “You could control…everything. The entire world.”

Charles quickly shakes his head. “You must understand, Erik, I wouldn’t dream of—”

“But you _could_.”

He’s hit with a wave of emotion from Erik that can be unequivocally labelled lust, and Charles coughs slightly in surprise. “I have to admit,” he says. “This is not the reaction I was expecting.”

Erik’s gaze is razor-sharp as he says, “But you’ve never told anyone the extent of your power?”

Charles hasn’t, not least because the correct reaction to this revelation would be fear. But instead Erik’s looking at him—and, for lack of a better word, _feeling _at him—with such an intense wave of interest that he’s half inclined to raise up a mental shield of some sort.

Only half, though. He pulls out his wallet and lays down what’s presumably enough money to cover the bottle of wine. “How about we skip dinner?”

Erik downs the rest of his wine in one sip and grins.

In the street, he throws his mind wide open, the full press of the thousands of minds in their immediate vicinity rushing through him, while the bright focus of Erik’s thoughts cuts through them all like a beacon. They walk side-by-side, close but not touching. When he turns to look at Erik, their eyes meet, and a jolt of anticipatory heat cycles between them through his telepathy.

He wonders, as their shoulders brush in the lift, what might have happened if they had met elsewhere, at some other time, if it still would have gone this way: it’s barely been 48 hours since his talk at Columbia, two days of circling each other—and then a simultaneous step forward.

The lift climbs suspiciously fast, and Charles glances over to see Erik studying the ornate ceiling.

“Please don’t break the Plaza’s lifts,” Charles says, laughter bubbling up.

Erik gives him an innocent smile. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Charles.”

He doesn’t wait for the room key, either, waving an impatient hand at the doorknob and shoving Charles inside. He slams the door behind them and they stand for a moment, faintly illuminated by the lights from the street, something intangible suspended between them.

Charles is the one to close the gap, stepping forward and placing both hands on Erik’s shoulders to pull him downwards. Their lips meet, and Erik leans in, pulling him closer and kissing him within an inch of his life, while pushing him backwards until they both hit the door, hard.

“Sorry,” Erik mumbles as he pulls back, tugging at the metal bits of Charles’s clothes with his powers as he uses his fingers to fumble at his tie. Erik’s mind is whirring, and Charles focuses his telepathy and sinks in, linking their minds in an infinite loop. It reverberates so strongly that they both stumble slightly, Erik catching his shoulders to right him, gripping tightly.

_Is this OK?_ Charles asks through their mental link.

_Yes_. The word is accompanied by a nearly overwhelming burst of emotion, and as Charles kisses him again, it feels like drowning.

He laces his fingers through Erik’s and pulls him through the sitting area and into the bedroom, shucking his suit jacket and making quick work of his waistcoat. Erik’s down to shirtsleeves, and Charles maneuvers him until he can push him backwards onto the bed, straddling his narrow hips and undoing the buttons of his shirt one by one.

He shimmies downward and reaches for Erik’s belt buckle, but Erik gently pulls his hand back via the same watch trick as the day before.

“Charles, I haven’t…”

He doesn’t sound uncertain, necessarily, but a question hangs loudly in his mind. Charles rifles through the flurry of thoughts, and when he finds the precise context, he laughs.

“Don’t worry, darling,” he says, pulling himself up the length of Erik’s body and leaning over so their lips are nearly touching. The link between their minds reverberates, and it washes over him in a wave from head to toe. He smiles into Erik’s mouth and says, “I’ll show you what to do.”


	6. Chapter 6

When Erik wakes, he sits up immediately and spends about ten disoriented seconds instinctively locating all the metal in the room before he remembers.

“Shhhhhh.”

Charles is next to him, lying on his stomach, sheets pulled low enough to leave the broad expanse of his back on full display. Erik has never seen so many freckles.

Charles snorts into the pillow. “I can tell you mean it in a complimentary fashion,” he says, his words half muffled as he delivers them to the fabric. “But please, can you think a little quieter?”

“Sorry,” Erik says quickly, trying to envision shutting a steel door on his thoughts. Charles winces and then rolls over to gaze upwards, studying him for a moment. In the early-morning light, his eyes are a remarkably clear blue. A slow smile spreads across his face.

“On second thought, think as loudly as you like,” Charles says, laughter in his voice. “In fact, I encourage it.”

He holds Erik’s gaze for another few seconds before Erik turns away, feeling abruptly and embarrassingly self-conscious. For all that he was happy to have Charles fill in particular gaps in his knowledge the night before, he has uniformly little experience with the morning after.

Charles grasps his hand and threads their fingers together. “It’s not that complicated,” he says softly, tugging Erik towards him. “We call for room service. Order something decadent. Eggs benedict, at the very least.”

Erik lets himself be pulled downwards until their lips meet, chastely at first, before Charles sighs into his mouth and pushes upwards. The press of Charles’s telepathy, a focused warmth, encompasses his mind, so unlike having Emma in his head, coolly teasing. Charles huffs a breath of laughter into his mouth.

_Thinking about Emma at a moment like this? _

It takes all of Erik’s willpower to think a semblance of an apology back at him. Charles’s amusement ripples outwards in response.

_Don’t apologize, it just goes to show I’m not being nearly distracting enough_.

He surges forward with the words, pressing a line of kisses along Erik’s jaw.

“I thought we were having eggs?” Erik is fully aware of how breathless he sounds.

Charles grins, and his free hand snakes beneath the sheets. “Let’s work up an appetite,” he whispers in Erik’s ear.

They finally make it out of bed around ten; Charles showers while Erik orders the eggs. He finds an obscenely soft robe in one of the closets, and he slips it on as he gazes out the window at the vast green swath of the park beneath them.

How many mutants live in this city? Hundreds, maybe thousands, waiting to be found, while the single most powerful person he’s ever met is in the next room, singing in the shower with an enthusiasm that makes up for what he lacks in skill. The past two days have a sort of surreal sheen to them; it’s only in passing that he remembers he’s just spent the night with Mystique’s brother.

“Do me a favor,” Charles says as he emerges from the bathroom, towel slung low around his hips as he runs another over his hair. “Please try to quell any train of thought that starts with us having sex and ends with my sister.”

“You shouldn’t listen in if you can’t handle what you hear,” Erik says in a mock-scolding tone, though he’s admittedly half distracted by the planes of Charles’s bare chest. Charles clearly catches the source of his distraction, and smirks.

“It’s worth the risk,” he says. He gestures vaguely behind his head. “The shower is free.”

Erik locates the majority of his clothing from the night before, following a trail across the bedroom from the bed to the door. After he showers he finds Charles fully dressed as well, seated at the dining table and stirring a cup of tea.

Erik sits down across from him and lifts the cloche from the nearest dish with his powers. “You’ve made your decision?”

“No breakfast small talk, I see,” Charles says with a sigh. “No, Erik, I didn’t have time to think about your proposal between sucking you off and you taking me from behind.”

A warmth creeps up the back of his neck at the crassness of the words and the memories they invoke, though he supposes it’s a fair assessment of a serious proposition delivered while naked, some time past midnight. A light, teasing laughter dances across the surface of his mind, and it reminds him so much of Emma that he nearly flinches.

“I feel as if I’ll know your other telepath intimately by the time I eventually meet her,” Charles says with a smile.

Erik rolls his eyes as he floats a butter knife across the table. “God help me,” he mutters.

Charles chuckles and takes a prim sip of tea. Erik studies him for a moment—the compact tidiness, dress shirt tucked neatly beneath a knit pullover, still-wet hair curling at the collar. He wonders if anyone ever sees the artifice of it, the total control beneath the unassuming, affable academic routine, or if Charles always makes sure no one digs that deeply.

Charles frowns. “I don’t go around fiddling with peoples’ perceptions of me left and right, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“But then,” Erik says slowly. “How would I know otherwise?”

Charles watches him for a moment, before he says evenly, “You wouldn’t.”

In his adolescence, his trust was never his to give, from the moment Schmidt placed the coin on his desk and raised the pistol. He remembers the weight of Schmidt’s hand on his shoulder, proprietary and casually threatening. There was always an undercurrent of pride in Schmidt's tone whenever he called Erik “my boy,” as if Erik were something between loyal research assistant and protégé, rather than prisoner and unwitting test subject.

Schmidt tore him down and rebuilt him, piece by piece. Erik has abstractly wondered, in a world where his mother was never shot in the head, if he might have become one of Schmidt’s followers, standing alongside Emma and Azazel and Janos. The right words likely could have done it, if Schmidt had caught him at his lowest moments and appealed to what they shared: powers especially built for destruction, and a desire to tear the world apart.

His life since the camps, save what he had in the first few months with Magda, has been marked by a series of alliances—around goals and sensibilities, and now, fears about humanity. He understands Emma, but he doesn’t trust her, not entirely; she knows this, of course, and has remarked on it, confiding in him that she doesn’t truly trust anyone herself, not when she knows what goes on inside their heads. If he could read minds, wouldn’t he feel the same way?

And yet Charles Xavier, with his naïveté that might charitably be called optimism, sits across from him, watching him steadily with those damnable blue eyes, sipping tea and acknowledging that Erik can never truly know if he’s seeing reality or illusion.

It might have been the haze of the afterglow, or the intimacy of darkness, but his late-night proposition—he’d all but begged Charles to stay on this side of the Atlantic, to work with him as a partner rather than a mere ally—is the greatest extension of trust he’s given in his entire life. It’s a terrifying thought.

He realizes that even in the sober light of day, he would say it all over again.

Charles clears his throat and places his teacup on the table. “If I were to contact the LMB about taking a leave of—”

“You _were _thinking about it!” Erik cuts in, triumphant.

“You took a while in the shower,” Charles says, and there’s a faint flush on his cheeks. “I was decidedly not thinking about it while I was sucking you off.”

“You’ll stay?” Erik asks, trying to imbue the urgency of it with his tone, though surely Charles can sense it far deeper than that.

“This doesn’t mean that I’m helping you build an army,” he says firmly, crossing his arms. “Or commit any acts of aggression to combat some hypothetical threat.”

“You’ll stay,” Erik repeats. It’s no longer a question.

Charles nods slowly. “Yes,” he says. “I’ll stay.”

*

He brings Charles to the Gramercy house the next day, where he receives a warm welcome from everyone save his sister, who retreats to her room when Charles tells her he’s going to be joining them for the foreseeable future. Angel gives him an appraising look and coolly shakes his hand before following Mystique up the stairs.

“Miss Salvadore…” Charles says. “Is she…?”

They’re alone in the room Erik’s commandeered for him, conveniently next to his own. Charles has laid his suitcase open on the bed and is inspecting its contents with a frown. “I’ll need to get more things…” he mutters.

“Angel was my right-hand woman until your sister showed up,” Erik says. “They became fast friends.”

“Friends…” Charles repeats, looking up. “Erik, you’re aware that they’re more than friends?”

“What do you mean?”

Charles shuts the suitcase and turns towards him, a smile spreading across his face even as he shakes his head. “It seemed impolite to root through the mind of your sister’s girlfriend upon first meeting, but it only took a quick dip to learn they’ve been sleeping together for months.”

“I…” He runs through Charles’s words again, then a second time. “What…”

Charles steps closer and wraps his arms around Erik’s waist, eyes full of laughter. “Observant, I see,” he says, stretching up on his toes. Erik meets him halfway, ducking his head to kiss him, quickly but firmly, before pushing him back slightly.

“Are you absolutely certain that they’re…” he says. “But how…?” He’s not exactly certain what that would even entail. Charles clearly overhears that thought, because he laughs aloud.

“In my quest to avoid any line of conversation about my sister and sex, I’m going to stop you right there,” he says. “But I can assure you that yes, it works just fine with two women.”

“How would you know?”

“They think about it,” Charles says. “Men as well. Far more often than you’d ever suspect, given publicly stated attitudes about such things.”

“People are fools,” Erik says quietly.

“Yes, well.” Charles pulls backward and hoists the suitcase to the floor. “I think we need to christen this bed,” he says with a mischievous smile.

“We have a meeting later this morning,” Erik reminds him, though it’s only a token protest.

“Plenty of time,” Charles says, grabbing Erik’s lapel and tugging him forward, before saying inside his head, _I promise to show you some of the best stuff I’ve seen in strangers’ minds._

_It’s a deal_, Erik thinks back, and shoves Charles down onto the bed.

They both look presentable enough when they join the others in the dining room a few hours later, though Charles’s cheeks are still flushed pink. Toad and Lorelei are taking seats, and Randall is coming in from the doorway to the kitchen.

Mystique is already seated at the head of the table, Angel standing behind her. As she traces a path along a map of Manhattan with a long blue finger, Angel leans in close to watch. They don’t look any different than they usually do.

He feels the ghost of a nudge in his side, though Charles, who smiles serenely as he takes a seat at the opposite end of the table from his sister, is a good foot away from him.

Erik remains standing. “Where are the others?”

“Out on a lead, boss,” Toad says. “Didn’t sound too promising, but a lead’s a lead, right?”

“Our leads are about to get a lot firmer,” Erik says, gesturing to Charles. “We have a telepath back in our mix.”

Mystique folds her arms across her chest, stone-faced, but the rest of the group perks up—even Angel looks grudgingly approving. Charles smiles broadly.

“I’m happy to help,” he says, spreading his hands in an expansive gesture. “Why don’t we start with the areas of interest you’re all working on, and I can tighten things up a bit, eliminate the need for so much legwork. Randall first, perhaps?”

“Sure,” Randall says, straightening up. He slides a dog-eared stack of papers towards Charles. “I’ve been out in Brooklyn. We’ve got multiple police reports about warehouse break-ins near the Gowanus Canal, all kind of…unusual shows of force, like someone’s…”

“Punched through the door…” Charles says, studying the top report. “Do we have a map of this area?”

“I’ll find one for you,” Lorelei says, standing quickly.

Charles is firing off questions for Randall while politely requesting a pen and then a glass of water, and Erik is slightly startled to realize how quickly Charles has taken control of the meeting. He catches Mystique’s gaze and she’s got a smug smile on her face as she nods her head in Charles’s direction, as clear an “I told you so” as if she’d said the words aloud.

Charles looks up at him sharply, the corners of his mouth turning downwards, before Randall returns with the water. The frown instantly vanishes, replaced with a polite smile and a word of thanks as he takes the glass; it all happens so quickly that Erik could have blinked and missed it.

He realizes then that it’s not necessarily the strength of his telepathy, or the things he can do with it—even the potential for mind control, as abstractly threatening as the idea is. Charles Xavier is dangerous, not least because he’ll do it all with a smile, and he’ll take care to make sure you never see it coming.

The thought should terrify him, and in the most rational corners of his brain, he is fully comfortable acknowledging the fact. But Charles is sitting there, projecting mild-mannered academic on full blast, soft and naïve and infuriatingly optimistic. The incongruity of it rattles him—and its draw is undeniably powerful.

“I’ll have to concentrate for a bit as I scan the area,” Charles is saying, marking a loose circle of Xs on the streets that butt up against the canal.

“You don’t need to go out to Brooklyn?” Angel cuts in. She’s still standing behind Mystique, arms folded across her chest, wings resting loosely on full display. She looks extremely skeptical.

“Oh no, that’s only—” He waves a hand vaguely across the map. “15 miles, perhaps? 20?”

“He’s got a big range,” Mystique says flatly, and pushes back her chair with more force than necessary. “I’ll be down in the training room.”

Charles watches her go with an inscrutable look on his face. Angel is broadcasting ambivalence as she swivels between Mystique’s retreating form and Charles.

“Can you…” She frowns. “If I give you a few names, descriptions, general whereabouts, can you add me to the telepathic to-do list?”

“Of course,” Charles says quickly. “Write it down and give it to me whenever you have a moment.”

Angel watches him for a moment, eyes still narrowed, before nodding and standing to follow Mystique to the basement.

“Well then,” Charles says, his tone clearly meant to change the subject. “Who else has requests for me?”

By the time the meeting breaks up Charles has amassed a surprisingly long list of potential mutants to locate, one he’s examining with a smile on his face as he scribbles notes. Erik uses his powers to tug the pen Charles is holding from the page.

Charles gives him a tired smile and then rubs his temple with his free hand. “For all my optimism, I’m starting to think that Raven isn’t going to come around.”

“You could start by calling her Mystique, you know,” Erik says lightly. Charles glares at him in return.

“Whatever’s between us is a little more serious than whatever silly codename she’s taken up.”

“And you don’t see that your dismissiveness is illustrating her point?”

Charles presses his lips into a tight line. “I should get started on the list,” he says, looking back down at his papers. “The legwork is very useful, but this is still like finding needles in haystacks a dozen blocks wide.”

Erik reads the dismissal for what it is. He finds Angel in the kitchen, preparing lunch.

“Can I help?” he asks. He likes any excuse to use a knife.

Angel rolls her eyes. “Yeah, you can,” she says, pointing a wooden spoon at him. “You can go talk to Mystique, because she sure as hell won’t talk to me, not about anything real, anyway.”

“What makes you think she’ll talk to me, then?” Erik asks. “I imagine she sees me as being in league with her brother.”

Angel laughs. “Pretty sure you don’t have to imagine that one. But she respects you, you know. You’ve got all those grand visions.” She waves a hand in the air to indicate her own level of respect for grand visions, before turning back to her mixing bowl.

Mystique is kicking a punching bag in the corner of the basement with so much force that Erik can feel the chains that affix it to the ceiling close to breaking. He stands and watches her for a moment, admiring her form; for all that her skills as a fighter were lacking when she joined the house, there’s a natural grace tied up in her anger, one that surely stems from her mutation. Now that she knows what she’s doing, she’s a sight to behold.

She clearly knows he’s standing there, but just as he’s about to interrupt, she stops, breathing hard, and turns to glare at him.

“I don’t want to hear it,” she says, giving the bag one final shove.

“Hear what?” he says casually.

Mystique begins to pace, a long flash of blue across his field of vision. He leans against the wall and crosses his arms.

“It’s just—” She stops mid-pace. Erik can see the tension rippling under her skin. “Look, I know he can be very convincing when he lays on the charm—”

“What exactly do you think _he _convinced me of?”

Mystique puts her hands on her hips. “What’s he doing here, then?”

“If anyone did any convincing, it was me,” Erik says.

She gives him a flat look but doesn’t say anything. Erik sighs, straightening up and stepping farther into the room.

“Your brother is a naïve fool, I don’t have to tell you this,” he says. Mystique raises her eyebrows. “But he has powers beyond what I ever could have imagined—I’d be a fool myself if I didn’t want him on our side.”

“You have to see where this is going,” Mystique says. “Charles is probably thrilled that he gets to hunt down mutants—he’s spent all these years speculating about us, but he’s been stuck with me alone. But we—” She places her palm flat against her chest. “_We _know what’s going to happen, eventually. We’re training for—”

“That was a conditional part of his agreement,” Erik cuts in. He’s not thrilled to admit that he’d conceded this point aloud, and Mystique gives him an extremely skeptical look. “He said he won’t build an army,” he continues. “But when it comes down to it—”

“You think he’s going to let that go?” Mystique sounds exasperated. “I know you only just met—maybe you haven’t learned that in addition to being obnoxiously optimistic, my brother is the single most stubborn person on the planet. Or at least I thought so, until I met you.”

“I think it’s easy to believe in pacifism when it’s purely theoretical,” Erik says.

Mystique stares at him for a moment, her yellow eyes wide.

“You and Angel are my strongest lieutenants, and while Emma is away, I need cohesion in this house,” he says firmly. “You have to trust me, and broker some sort of truce with your brother. I’ll handle the ideological differences.”

Mystique snorts and shakes her head. “I want to state for the record that I did try to warn you. You know, when whatever spell he cast over you wears off—”

“No one cast any spells,” Erik says, perhaps a little too sharply, because her eyes narrow at that. For one wild second, he thinks of deflecting and mentioning her relationship with Angel, before realizing that if he does, he may as well paint a big red arrow pointing at the nature his overnight alliance with Charles.

“I’m not saying he’s controlling you,” Mystique says slowly. “It’s just, he’s never really had any friends, aside from me.”

“I know what I’m doing, Mystique,” Erik says, keeping his tone as even as he can manage. “Don’t let your bitterness towards your brother get in the way of what we need to do.”

He turns before she can get in a final word in, heading back towards the stairs. He needs to end this conversation before he reveals that he doesn’t know what he’s doing—not even remotely. He’s never really had any friends, either.

Charles is still sitting in the dining room, eyes shut, one finger at his temple and the other making notes. Erik hovers in the doorway, frowning, until Charles once again declares him a distraction and shoos him away.

It’s late afternoon when Charles calls everyone back and hands out marching orders. He sends Lorelei to an office in Rockefeller Plaza, Toad to a house in Rego Park, and Randall to a restaurant in Carroll Gardens that is almost certainly a front for the mob. Angel’s mutant works in the Garment District, and Charles plucks the man’s delivery schedule from his mind; Mystique transforms into a burly, dark-haired man in a flat cap to accompany her there.

“That leaves us with the cab driver,” Charles tells Erik as he ushers him towards the front door. “I located him while I was doing a few sweeps through Midtown. I’ve got a handle on his mind now—I believe I could find him anywhere in the city. He’s headed towards Union Square at the moment, we should be able to catch him easily.”

The casual reference to the scope of Charles’s power provokes an inevitable sort of heat, and it gathers low in Erik’s stomach as he steps out onto 20th Street. Charles catches his gaze and the corners of his lips curl upwards.

“Flattering as always, thank you,” he says. The weather has turned back towards winter, and he’s bundled up in grey wool, with a bright blue scarf that makes his eyes look even more striking.

In more than a year of recruiting, Erik and Emma never perfected a strategy, not least because half the time, they couldn’t agree on one. Even when she could see in peoples’ minds, Emma had a hard time believing, deep down, that anyone would act for any reason other than self-interest. Erik tended towards the opposite, growing quickly frustrated with anyone who couldn’t see their own potential, or the potential of their collective cause. Where he saw people clinging to the safety of the small lives they knew, hiding their gifts, Emma saw self-preservation.

He worries that Charles will be equally accepting of that sort of cowardice, but then, Charles has—what had Angel called them? Grand visions. They cannot hide when they are the next step forward in human evolution, no matter how cautious Charles might claim to be.

They walk briskly towards Park Avenue and cross the street, and then Charles stops short and thrusts his arm out, raising two fingers high in the air. A cab pulls up to the curb and Erik pulls open the door with his powers for Charles to slide in first.

“Where to, gentlemen?”

The driver is slimly built, with a dark complexion and close-cropped black hair, and Erik would estimate him to be a decade younger than him, maybe more. He eyes them in the mirror as he waits for a destination. Charles’s arm is draped casually across the back of the seat, just shy of touching; he feels the warmth of Charles’s watch pressing against his wrist, just behind his head.

“The Natural History Museum,” Charles says.

“Crosstown at this time of day, it’s gonna take a while,” the driver says as he shifts into gear.

Charles smiles, glancing at Erik. “Yes, I hope so.”

Erik meets his smile, and drops the flag on the meter with a flick of his wrist.

*

The success of their first recruit is intoxicating. It isn’t that the others haven’t been exciting—whenever he and Emma and Azazel and Janos found someone, or even better, brought them back to New York, they’d shared a sort of triumph of their convictions, making champagne toasts to a sense of rightness in what they were building, mutant by mutant.

But with Armando—_Darwin_, he’d told them, because his mutation allowed him to adapt to anything, and Charles had never looked so star-struck as he had at that moment—it was different, somehow. They took him for a drink at a bar a few blocks from the Natural History Museum, gave him the Gramercy address, and told him to come down when he was ready.

They’d caught a different cab home—_Not a mutant_, Charles had informed him, his mental voice warm with amusement, as he nodded at the driver—and barely made it through the front door before Erik was yanking off Charles’s coat and Charles was putting a finger to his temple to distract their housemates. He later admitted, sheepishly, that he’d put the whole house—and their neighbors on either side of the building—to sleep for hours.

_We’re going to change the world_, Charles had whispered in Erik’s ear, his voice inside his head and all around it, their bodies pressed together as they moved in tandem.

The next three attempts aren’t so lucky. Two of the mutants are polite enough in their refusal, and if Charles’s acquiescence in the face of their cowardice is everything Erik feared it would be, somehow his cheery disposition manages to soften the blow, as he smiles and shrugs and points to the next name on the list.

The third mutant is a scrawny, pale teenager that they approach while he’s wiping down tables at a diner on 14th Street, and despite all appearances to the contrary, he’s the one who gives them trouble, growing increasingly agitated by Charles’s gentle questions until he raises his hands and suddenly freezes, going stock-still, breathing but no longer blinking. Erik looks at Charles, who’s frowning, and then around the diner, where everyone in sight—the line cook, the waitresses, half a dozen customers—are also frozen, mid-gesture, forkfuls of eggs suspended en route to their mouths, bills falling from one waitress’s hand as she counts at the register.

“Did you…?” Erik looks back at Charles, startled.

“Our young friend here was panicking, internally,” Charles says. “And he shoots poison from his fingertips.” He tilts his head and picks up the mutant’s left hand, examining his fingers. “He’s killed several people accidentally, the poor boy.”

“But…” Erik gestures at the frozen tableau surrounding them.

“Oh yes, I’ll wipe their memories,” Charles says quickly, dropping the mutant’s hand. “When we’re a few blocks away, I think.”

As he follows Charles back out onto the street, bell jangling as they open and close the door behind them, he can’t help but look back once more at the sight of an entire restaurant trapped in a state of suspended animation.

They’ve been recruiting for a week when Darwin arrives, dressed in a neat overcoat and carrying a small bag. Erik appreciates a man who packs lightly.

“Quite the location,” Darwin says, eyebrows raised, as he glances back onto the street.

“More conspicuous than I’d like,” Erik says with a nod. The longer Emma’s been in Europe, the more frustrated he’s grown with the ostentation of the neighborhood, even if she’s still footing the bill. Charles’s comfort here is another point on the list of evidence that he’s quite well off, though he just smiles evasively whenever Erik fishes for details about his finances.

Angel, who’s been hovering on the landing at the turn of the stairs, descends and holds out a hand. “Angel,” she says. “And yeah. You don’t get used to it.”

The phone rings, and she turns to Erik. “You wanna get that, boss? I can help him pick out a room.”

Erik answers the phone in the dining room. He’s met with a wave of static before he hears a woman’s voice, tinny but clear.

“Emma?” he asks.

“Erik, thank God,” she says. “It was hard enough getting this call through, I don’t have the patience to talk to one of the underlings right now.”

“I haven’t heard from you in close to a month,” Erik says, trying to keep his voice even. “What the hell have you been doing?”

“We—” The line breaks up again.

“Emma?” He’s close to shouting. “Emma!”

“—behind the Iron Curtain, but—”

“What?”

“Can you hear me?” Emma sounds as exasperated as he feels.

“Emma, where are you?”

“Hungary,” she says. “We’ve been in and out of the USSR for weeks. Look—what are they reporting in the American papers?”

“About what?”

“The nuclear situation.”

He tries to remember the last time he read a newspaper. For the past week and a half, every spare moment has been occupied by Charles, recruiting or otherwise—with a great deal of otherwise.

“Just the usual tit-for-tat posturing, as far as I’m aware,” he says. He’s certain he’d have heard if anything else had happened, not least through Charles’s telepathy. “Why do you ask?”

“This is serious, Erik,” she says, urgency in her voice. “Azazel has sources on the ground in—”

The line goes dead. Erik glares at the receiver for a moment before hanging up with a thud.

“That was Emma?”

Charles is leaning against he doorframe, arms crossed. Erik nods.

“She’s in Hungary, of all places, but we were barely able to speak before we lost the connection,” he says.

Charles raises his eyebrows. “I wasn’t aware they were in the Eastern Bloc.”

Neither was Erik, but he remains silent as Charles crosses into the room and takes a seat at the table. He looks paler than usual, and there’s a tightness at the corners of his eyes.

“Are you all right?” Erik asks, taking the seat next to him.

Charles waves a hand. “Fine, fine,” he says. “It’s just—” He heaves a great sigh, his shoulders slumping. “The number of minds I’m combing through…” He smiles, though it’s a bit half-hearted. “Let’s just say it’s an arduous process.”

Erik imagines what it would be like to comb through the metal, or the electromagnetic fields on each and every building on the length of this street, let alone the entire city. He has no idea what telepathy feels like, or if the idea of it is remotely comparable, but it’s exhausting all the same.

“If only there were a way to…consolidate these batches of people somehow,” Charles says, steepling his fingers together and pressing his index fingers to his lips.

Something turns over in Erik’s mind, and he thinks again of electromagnetic fields.

“What if…?”

Charles looks up, his eyes widening. “Do you really think you would be able to build something like that?”

Erik has barely threaded together a complete idea and Charles is already digging through his head. He shakes his head with a laugh. “Possibly, but…” He gestures to the room. “There’s no way we have enough space to test something out here. Never mind that you’d be wiping peoples’ memories left and right.”

Charles glances away for a beat, then another, his expression unreadable. When he turns back, he has a grimly determined look on his face. “If we’re looking for space and relative isolation, my friend, I believe I may have a solution.”


	7. Chapter 7

Charles remembers leaving the house at sixteen, university-bound and dressed in a suit that was a bit too large for his slight frame. Raven, her blond curls tucked under a jaunty little beret, had been nearly vibrating with excitement beside him; it was obvious, even without reading her mind, that she was just as relieved to leave as he was.

He’d looked back as they wound down the long drive, and as the house grew smaller, Kurt’s unsmiling face blurring to a pale smudge against the mass of stone, Charles had felt something inside him growing lighter, ounce by ounce.

He’s only returned once, for his mother’s funeral, a whirlwind 48 hours back in America occupied mostly by legal documents and internment arrangements and polite smiles. He spent a single night in his childhood bed—spectacularly drunk, if his admittedly hazy memories of the trip serve; it had seemed like a darkly fitting tribute to his mother, to make a dent in the contents of her favorite liquor cabinet.

Now, as the house comes into view, he feels a bit of that uncanny lightening sensation, but in reverse. It’s accompanied by Erik’s mental jolt of alarm, even as his mouth is set in a firm, unmoving line.

He decides to head Erik off at the pass. “Yes, it’s—”

_Monstrous_, Erik thinks, but he simply says, “Large.”

Charles lets out half a laugh at the understatement of it. “Quite,” he says.

Erik’s thoughts have swirled suspiciously around money throughout the past fortnight—though not necessarily having it or spending it; his exquisitely-cut suits suggest his own significant sum of cash in the bank that, Charles has pieced together from stray thoughts, Erik obtained through less-than-legal means. But Erik’s been poking around for confirmation that Charles comes from money, rather than merely possessing it; it ties into his broader view that Charles’s optimism is fundamentally rooted in naïveté, and that he has been sheltered from life’s realities.

Predictably, Erik’s looking at the house and thinking that everything he’s suspected is correct.

Charles isn’t particularly interested in countering this line of thought with any of his less-than-pleasant childhood memories, but the idea of setting foot inside the house again, an abstract source of worry since he suggested it a few days ago, is suddenly, painfully concrete, manifesting in a blossoming headache that pinches at the bridge of his nose.

The caretaker, Stevens, greets them at the front door. He doesn’t look much different than he did when Charles was sixteen, save that his hair’s gone fully grey.

“Dr. Xavier,” he says, ushering them inside after Charles has introduced him to Erik. “I’ve readied the entirety of the west wing. It should be suitable for your half-dozen guests, but if you’re anticipating more—”

“No, that’s perfect, thank you, Stevens,” Charles says.

Erik is looking up at the looming chandelier and mouthing, _Wings_?

They left Randall in charge of the Manhattan house, and most of its residents, embroiled in leads, decided to stay, but Raven, Angel, and Armando opted to join them, and will drive up to Westchester in a few days’ time. Angel was excited to have a place to literally stretch her wings, and Armando, Charles has been pleased to learn, is both eager to help out and infinitely easy-going. But Charles was more than a little surprised that Raven decided to come, too; he suspects her interest in staying by Angel’s side was strong enough to outweigh her desire to be as far from him as humanly possible.

Charles dismisses Stevens with a handshake and waits until the front door is safely closed before reaching out to place a possessive hand on Erik’s waist.

“Since you gave me the room next to yours in the city,” he says. “I ought to return the favor.”

Erik rolls his eyes. “I don’t get an entire wing?”

“Keep this up and I’ll exile you to one,” Charles says lightly. He runs his hand down Erik’s side, following the warm surge of interest in Erik’s mind before threading their fingers together. “Come on.” He gives Erik’s hand a soft tug. “I’ll show you the house of horrors.”

Stevens has either been very dutiful in the near-decade since Charles’s mother died, or he’s employed something close to an army in the few short days since Charles informed him they’d need to open up the house. He suspects it’s most likely both. The hardwood floors and mahogany panels of the wide hallways are polished to a high shine as always, the carpet just as springy underfoot as it ever was.

Erik takes it all in with wide eyes, his relatively neutral expression betrayed by the strong undercurrent of derision running through his mind as they climb the stairs.

“This one’s mine,” Charles says, pressing a hand against the heavy wooden door of his childhood bedroom. Erik steps into the space of his hesitation and turns the doorknob with his powers.

There’s very little left that would suggest it was once a young boy’s room, let alone his own, though if he’s being honest, even as a child there was something coldly adult about it: the leather-bound books lined up neatly on floor-to-ceiling shelves, the delicately upholstered furniture in the sitting area by the fireplace. He used to curl up on the settee there and concentrate on the subtler elements of changing peoples’ minds, turning Kurt away from his mother’s room, or turning Cain away from his.

“It’s very…” Erik looks around with a frown. “Well-appointed.”

Charles laughs at this as he runs a finger along the surface of the bedside table. Stevens and his staff haven’t left a speck of dust.

“I used to keep photos of film stars here,” he says, leaning against the bed as he raps his fingertips against the table. He can feel Erik’s amusement even as he reads it clearly in his eyes. He’s not sure why he’s telling Erik this at all, but something about seeing him in this room, in this house, leaves Charles feeling unmoored. “And, um…” he adds, heat rising on the back of his neck as he says it, “Also one of Albert Einstein.”

“Ah,” Erik says, mouth stretching into a smirk. “Of course. What young boy wouldn’t keep a photograph of Einstein close to his bedside?”

“The most important thinker of the twentieth century thus far,” Charles says, mock-officiously. Erik laughs and takes a seat next to him, long legs stretched out across the carpet, nudging his shoulder softly before leaving it there, their arms pressed together.

“Science,” Erik says quietly. “When you were a boy. You tried to understand the sciences so you could understand your powers.”

It’s a perceptive observation, but it’s not quite the whole of it. In his earliest memories, he remembers struggling to understand why the things he said to adults provoked such confusion—and, occasionally, revulsion—until he realized that he was the only one amongst them who could hear peoples’ thoughts. _Abnormal child_, he’d heard more than once. _She should send him to an institution_.

“I tried to understand the sciences so I could prove my sanity,” Charles says, equally quiet. Erik’s thoughts darken at that, growing tightly protective. “It took me quite a while to understand that most people only hear their own thoughts.”

“Did anyone else realize you were doing it?” Erik asks.

“Yes and no,” Charles says slowly. He taps his temple. “They knew I wasn’t quite right.” The protective aura in Erik’s mind winnows to a sharp point, and Charles gives him a soft nudge to quiet his thoughts. “Sorry, poor choice of words. But once I figured out what was going on, I worked on smoothing their minds, erasing any sense that I was perceiving the world differently.”

“Your parents’ minds?”

Charles shakes his head. “The staff, mostly. Nannies, tutors, the housekeeper. My mother… She wasn’t paying attention, not in any significant way.”

Erik’s thinking, with a sort of melancholic tinge, about what his parents might have thought, had his powers manifested at a younger age. And then, about what it would be like to grow up with a mother who didn’t care about you at all, mutant powers or otherwise.

Charles thinks of the house of recruits, each one of them saddled with childhood memories much like Raven’s from the years before she appeared in his kitchen. He saw the same patterns in the minds of the people they’ve located in the past week, their memories shaped by anger and fear and, more often than not, exile. The worst of them was the boy in the diner, who accidentally killed two classmates and then his sister, before he ran as far as he could—2,000 miles, give or take, to New York City.

What would happen if they were able to track down mutants before their families tried to break them, or chucked them out on the street? If they found them when they were children? Would they even know what to do with a bunch of frightened kids with uncontrollable powers?

He glances at Erik, his face in profile, and follows the razor-sharp line of his jaw. Erik would love younger recruits, surely—they’d be easier to shape into weapons in their formative years.

“Anyway,” Charles says briskly, brushing his hands against his trousers as he stands. “Shall we continue the tour?”

He positions himself in front of Erik, shoulders squared and legs parted slightly. Erik looks up at him, the expression on his face unreadable. His mind is generally extremely well-ordered—far more than most, and on a whole, beautifully arranged—but right now his thoughts are a messy jumble, too many disparate strands for Charles to unpick without slow, careful effort.

And then, as their eyes meet, Charles can feel the extraneous thoughts falling away, as Erik pulls all of his focus towards some center point, directed at Charles and the narrow space between their bodies.

“In a minute,” Erik says, and Charles feels a sharp tugging sensation in his middle—his belt buckle, he realizes, and the metal of his flies.

Erik offers him a predatory smile, and reaches up to close the gap between them.

*

Erik’s grand plan—which he’s detailed with a set of wildly complex schematics that challenge Charles’s admittedly limited knowledge of the physical sciences and engineering—is to amplify Charles’s telepathy using electromagnetic fields.

He explains the basics, as his long fingers trace the diagrams for the machine in a way that’s only slightly distracting. It will be calibrated and powered by Erik, operated by Charles, and need to be built in a very large room. Luckily, Charles owns a very large house—one equipped with bunkers that extend several stories below ground, perhaps the one thing Kurt left behind that’s of any use.

“What’s your physical range? Telepathically, I mean,” Erik asks him, pulling a pencil from behind his ear and re-sketching something that just looks like a series of parallel lines.

Charles shrugs and tries to do the math based on past experimentation. “Maybe…200 miles?”

Erik drops the pencil on the schematics and looks up at him, his sense of control lost, for once, as his face displays his shock.

“Is that farther than Emma?” Charles asks innocently.

Erik recovers and gives him a flat look. Charles isn’t looking to make this a competition, precisely—but he’s never claimed to be particularly modest.

“Charles,” Erik says, picking up the pencil and writing a flurry of numbers on the page. “The calculations are rough, but if they’re correct, I can amplify your natural range to…”

“Encompass the entire world,” Charles finishes as he plucks the information from Erik’s mind.

The idea of sweeping across the globe, gathering up the world’s mutants under one massive telepathic umbrella, is slightly intimidating—but mostly, it’s thrilling.

He places a hand on the schematics. “What do you need to build this thing?”

The first deliveries begin to arrive shortly after Armando, Angel, and Raven do. Charles spends a few hours hovering, trying to be even remotely helpful, as Erik builds complicated-looking circuits in the largest room of Kurt’s sub-basement, until Erik snaps and kicks him out, telling Charles he’ll be allowed back when there’s actually something to test.

He occupies the next few days working with Armando—“It’s Darwin, Doc,” Armando says affably, but while Charles thinks it’s a sight better than “Mystique,” he still finds himself saying the man’s given name, the one that sits in his subconscious, laced through all of his memories. Armando’s mind is a spectacular one to dip into, and a difficult one at that—it’s wildly mercurial, shifting constantly in attempts to repel Charles’s powers no matter what angle in he tries. He doesn’t push too hard; there’s no need to hurt the man for the sake of proving that no mind is impenetrable.

Armando truly is up for anything. With enthusiastically granted permission, Charles sets him on fire, then holds him under in the swimming pool, then tosses him out a second-story window, followed by the roof. Angel finds their experiments entertaining, while Raven looks on, her arms crossed and a mulish expression on her face, making snide comments about Charles’s unhealthy desire to turn them all into science experiments—never mind that Armando finishes every death-defying bout with a cheerful, “What’s next?”

Things are easier with Raven when Erik emerges for meals; his presence at the table somehow mollifies her. Not that he’s a particularly sunny addition to the conversation, offering up his own share of snide comments while giving Charles so many meaningful looks that he’s quite certain the others are going to pick up on their sleeping arrangements before too long.

But after two weeks of being, for all intents and purposes, both attached at the hip and deep inside Erik’s mind, the distance, small as it is, is hard to adjust to. He keeps a light pulse on Erik’s thoughts throughout the day, like pressing the pads of his fingers gently against his arm, but he doesn’t dare push in further, for fear of distracting Erik while he’s deep amongst the wires that will feed directly into Charles’s skull.

They close the gap in the evenings. Some nights are leisurely, while others are tinted with an edge of desperation. Tonight, Charles senses, is more of the former, as he meets Erik’s gaze across the dinner table and sends a vague impression of the chessboard in the study. Erik nods, his expression neutral even as his thoughts surge with warm anticipation.

“How close are we to testing?” Charles asks as he heads towards the sideboard. He pours a scotch for himself and starts to mix Erik a martini.

Erik’s arranging the pieces on the antique chessboard with his powers. Charles remembers learning on the set when he was a very young boy, trying to snatch as much information as he could from his father’s head while his father patiently explained the rules. The pieces had seemed extraordinarily heavy at the time; now he knows that they’re magnetically weighted.

“Two days, perhaps,” Erik says. Charles hands him the drink and he nods in thanks. “Maybe less, but maybe more. I’ve made a few theoretical leaps—if those don’t pan out, then I’ll have to overhaul a bit.”

If Erik’s innate brilliance—wholly self-taught, Charles knows, though Erik’s never said a word on the subject—isn’t enough in and of itself, it’s watching his mind work through the plans in real time that nearly knocks Charles off kilter. He sits across the board from Erik and takes a too-long sip of his drink to center himself.

“And what acts of sadism did you commit today?” Erik says, laughter in his voice, as Charles moves the first pawn.

“All consensual, and all in the name of scientific discovery,” Charles says, holding up his hands in mock-surrender. “Actually, today I set the ladies on him. Hand-to-hand combat, mostly, with a brief acid-spitting interlude.”

Erik raises his eyebrows. “Mystique agreed to work with you?”

“She agreed to work with Armando,” Charles concedes. “In truth I think she just had some aggression she wanted to get out.”

Raven had always been quick to anger. In those first few years, Charles had marveled at the way her mind worked when she felt threatened—where his instincts were to try to assert calm, even some sort of control, she tended to mentally close ranks before lashing out, swiftly and definitively. It was so different from the low-simmering fury that Kurt had carried around, laced through with resentment even when he’d gotten everything he ever wanted, or the way that transferred to Cain, an ever-present wound, just below the surface.

He’d understood—though perhaps only on an intellectual level—that Raven had often _wanted _to fight. She viewed the world in physical terms, action meeting action. In the years when Cain had delighted in going after Charles, Raven had harbored fiercely protective visions of strangling him with her bare hands, even when Charles held her back—he knew it would only make things worse. She obeyed his requests, no matter how vehemently she disagreed.

He can acknowledge now that he didn’t often respect her wishes in kind. Boys on bicycles when they’d go into town; later, men who were a bit too forward in pubs. Inevitably, Charles would step in and they’d become distracted, leaving Raven with her anger and nowhere to put it.

“It’s _dangerous_,” he’d said one afternoon in their early adolescence, as firm as he could manage, yanking her down the high street and away from the befuddled group of boys who were suddenly very interested in peering into the shop-front window of an accounting firm. “Four against one, not to mention what would happen if you slipped into your natural form—”

“Four against two!” Raven had shot back, eyes flashing amber for a split second. “You could have my back for once, instead of just…just…_solving_ everything!”

He hadn’t been able to understand why ending conflict before it began was a bad thing. He didn’t want to fight anyone. Cain was a complicated case, but this was straightforward: those boys were bigger than Raven, despite her recent growth spurt, and they were probably twice his size, since he’d always been smaller than average. Besides, he’d thought, what was the point of being able to mentally nudge someone away if you didn’t use it in times of trouble?

“Charles?”

Erik is staring at him and gesturing at the board, his mind equal parts concern and impatience.

“Apologies, my friend,” Charles says, clearing his throat as he assesses Erik’s opening move. “I was lost in thought.”

“I gathered,” Erik says dryly. “Is it…” His eyes flick upwards, and he manages to encompass the entire scope of the study in his gaze. “You don’t enjoy being in this house.”

Charles starts at that; he was certain that he’d been projecting an air of neutrality about the place, at the very least. “What makes you say that?”

“I watch you, occasionally,” Erik says evenly. _Closely_, his mind corrects, so subtle it feels like a whisper; it’s clear he doesn’t mean to project the word.

“If I’m being frank,” Charles says, leaning forward to take his turn. “It’s particularly hard to be back here when Raven and I are on the outs. She was my only ally, in my youth.”

Erik watches him over the rim of his glass. He’s thinking about the potential of the house, as they build an army; the sublevels alone are reason enough to stay here, he thinks, and the methodical precision of his mind is parceling out sections for training, defense, and weapons storage.

But undercutting it all, his ambition is warring with his protectiveness—a great surge of warmth that swells up and encompasses his feelings about Charles, and the fact that Charles doesn’t particularly enjoy being here.

Charles catches all of it at once, and he covers his shock with a light cough, taking another sip of his drink.

It seems fantastical, really, that he flew to America only a few weeks ago, and after spending most of his adult life flitting between the most casual of sexual encounters, he’s somehow tumbled head-first into a bona fide _relationship _with Erik, the first mutant he’d ever met aside from his sister, a maddeningly headstrong man whose intensity of feeling for Charles is only matched by his conviction that he will eventually bend Charles towards his view of the world.

The irony, of course, is that underneath his equally strong feelings for Erik—and the strength of them truly frightens him, in a way he doesn’t like to examine too closely—he’s wholly convinced that it’s only a matter of time before Erik comes around to _his _point of view.

“Well,” Erik says, a little too loudly, as if he’s trying to forcibly pull Charles from his distraction. “She’s no longer your only ally under this roof.”

His mind is framing the words with an uncharacteristic earnestness, and Charles opens the telepathic connection so it flows in both directions, sending gratitude and affection in a single wordless burst.

Color rises on Erik’s cheekbones, and it’s his turn to duck his head. “Take your turn,” he says gruffly.

Charles smiles and slides his bishop forward.

*

“This seems bad,” Armando announces, laying the morning newspaper on the kitchen table.

Charles looks up blearily from his tea to read the headline: _FINAL ROUND OF TALKS BREAK DOWN BETWEEN U.S. AND U.S.S.R.; IS WAR INEVITABLE? _

He sighs as he scans the article. “To be honest, while this should be worrying, I feel like I’ve been reading the exact same thing for the past two years.”

“I don’t know, Doc,” Armando says as he measures out a spoonful of coffee grounds. “Don’t you get the sense that things will eventually have to move past all this big talk?”

“Yeah, but who’s actually gonna blink first?” Angel says as she enters the kitchen, nodding at Charles as she walks past him. She’s wearing a backless shirt, and her wings shimmer brilliantly in the early morning light. “You want eggs, Doc?”

Charles has been banned from cooking since the day Raven, Angel, and Armando arrived at the house and he attempted to heat up a few cans of soup for lunch. There likely would have been actual property damage if Armando hadn’t used his body as a human fire blanket. Charles liked to think of the incident as a first experiment on the extent of the man’s mutation.

“Yes, thank you,” he says gratefully. “And to answer your question, I think that’s precisely why we’re trapped in a holding pattern. Neither side is brash enough to strike simply because they can, but they both know the other has the strength to obliterate them. There’s a term for it—mutually assured destruction.”

“Kind of like you and Erik, huh?” Angel says with a laugh. Armando chuckles from the vicinity of the coffee maker.

Charles splutters into his tea and turns towards the stove. “Pardon me?”

Angel waves a spatula with an air of fake innocence before she winks at him. “Oh, nothing.”

He shouldn’t be surprised that they know about his ideological differences with Erik. They argue in front of the others frequently: nothing particularly heated, but certainly enough to illustrate how often they clash. Besides that, Raven has surely complained to Angel about her naïvely optimistic brother, and they’ve been working for Erik long enough to know how little stock he puts in the idea of peace, or, for that matter, the inherent goodness of humanity.

But mutually assured destruction? He’s not about to tell them that he and Erik find all the compromise they need every night. He gets an involuntary flash of Kennedy and Khrushchev solving their differences through similar means—and then considers wiping his own memory.

Erik saves him from having to respond by marching into the kitchen looking extraordinarily serious. Charles can still feel Armando and Angel’s amusement telepathically, but they both have remarkably good poker faces.

“Charles,” Erik says, nodding in thanks as Armando hands him a cup of coffee. “It’s ready.”

Erik’s installation is enormous, the walls of Kurt’s massive bunker lined with some sort of alloy they’d had to order at an exorbitant amount of money per panel. Charles has seen the completed room in Erik’s mind, but actually standing in it is astounding, especially as he feels the electromagnetic hum of the place through Erik’s senses, the feelings he picks up from Erik every day, amplified exponentially.

“We’ll start small,” Erik says firmly. His voice is carefully neutral, but his worry for Charles is spiking internally. It’s sweet, but it’s also very distracting.

“I’ll be fine, honestly,” he says, placing a hand on Erik’s bicep. He leans up to press a chaste kiss to the corner of his mouth.

The device itself is a helmet made of a light steel alloy, a tight circlet that presses up against his temples and crisscrosses over the top of his head. Erik frowns as he puts it on, his mind warring over unhappiness that he’s made Charles a test subject versus the fact that this whole scheme was his idea in the first place. Charles gives him a light mental nudge and tries to imbue it with a sense of reassurance.

“You understand what I’m about to do?” Erik asks, folding his arms across his chest.

“We’ve gone over this a dozen times, yes,” Charles says. “Please just get on with it.”

Erik frowns but nods stiffly, and he moves over to a set of controls a few yards away, extending his arms and pressing his palms flat against what Charles knows to be a conductor of some kind. He feels the tiniest trickle of energy coursing through the helmet, and then—

“Oh my God!” he shouts, letting out a startled laugh.

The raw power coursing through him is extraordinary—he can feel the entire minds of everyone in the house all at once, all their thoughts and memories and hopes and fears. He stretches farther out, then farther still. It wouldn’t be hard, he thinks, to hold the minds of every single person in the entire world. His nerve endings are on fire and there’s something painful ricocheting through his skull and Erik’s right in front of him now, saying something that he can’t quite make out, but it doesn’t matter because—

_Charles!_

He can feel Erik inside his mind—he’s right there, but for some reason, Charles can’t see him.

“Charles!”

There’s a sharp sting against his cheek, and Charles’s eyes fly open. He’s on the floor, flat on his back, and Erik’s leaning over him, projecting alarm so loudly that Charles is certain a non-telepath could pick up on it.

“Charles, are you all right?” Raven asks. She’s kneeling on his other side, and she takes his left hand and laces their fingers together. The sight of her blue hand in his seems almost surreal after all this time. His self-control is completely shot, and he involuntarily dips into her mind to find a mirror version of Erik’s panic.

He tries to sit up, but Erik places a hand firmly across his chest and pushes him back down.

“Absolutely not,” he says. “Charles—you should’ve taken the helmet off sooner.”

His tone is harsh, almost accusatory, but Charles can feel the undercurrent of terror, combined with a heavy dose of guilt. Armando and Angel standing somewhere near his feet, watching uncertainly, and while he’s beyond grateful to have Raven holding his hand, half of him wishes they’d all leave so he can be as frank with Erik as he’d like.

“I should have, you’re right,” he says instead. He’s not actually certain there’s much he could have done, but there’s no need to compound Erik’s guilt. “That’s what testing’s for, of course.” He tries for a smile, but from the collective reaction he suspects it’s more of a grimace.

His head feels like it’s about to split open, and he tries his usual headache tricks for a moment, but no amount of psychic manipulation seems to fix it. Erik and Raven flank him as he slowly makes his way up to his bedroom, Armando and Angel trailing behind them. As Raven eases him onto the bed he gives her hand one last squeeze and whispers, “Thank you.”

“Don’t do that again,” she says, trying for stern, though her eyes are wide with concern.

“Thanks to all of you,” he says. They turn to leave save Erik, who glances at the door and then back to Charles.

“Erik, I know I should rest,” he says. “But first we should discuss the modifications I think we need, so you can get to work.”

Erik nods and hovers at the foot of the bed as the other three shuffle out of the room. After they shut the door, he clears his throat. “So what do you propose we—”

Charles holds up a hand and laughs softly, which unfortunately sends a fresh wave of pain through his skull. “I don’t actually want to talk about that right now.” He pats the empty space on the bed next to him. “Come here.”

Erik raises his eyebrows but he obeys, slipping off his shoes and climbing onto the bed next to Charles. He stretches out beside him, curling in slightly, the long length of his body bracketing Charles’s own. He tentatively rests a hand on Charles’s stomach.

“I could have killed you,” Erik whispers. His regret is a steady pulse underpinning his thoughts.

Charles places his hand on top of Erik’s. “You didn’t,” he says. “You won’t.”

“I don’t know whether your confidence in me is touching or just another mark of how astoundingly foolish you are,” Erik mutters.

“Perhaps both,” Charles says with a smile.

“Someday that unearned confidence is going to get you killed,” Erik says, though there’s no heat behind the words. “But I promise that I won’t be the one to do it.”

Charles sends him a warm cloud of affection, and Erik tucks his face into the crook of his neck. He drifts off with Erik’s mind softly pressing up against his own.

They wait a few days to try the device again. Charles isn’t particularly worried, but Erik makes a lot of noise about needing to overhaul the whole thing, even though Charles knows he’s stalling—and, for that matter, he knows that Erik knows that he knows. He finally convinces Erik it’s time to give it another go through subtle emotional manipulation, feeling only the slightest prick of guilt along the way.

“You promise to actually start small this time?” Erik asks as Charles puts the helmet on. “I’ll increase the current gradually.”

Charles nods. “I promise not to try to read the minds of all 3 billion people on earth at once,” he says with a laugh.

“This isn’t a laughing matter, Charles.”

Charles presses his lips together. “I’m ready.”

The current begins like a trickle, just as it did before, but Erik increases it more slowly this time, like pulling a very heavy lever, and now that Charles knows what it’s meant to feel like, he can stretch his power more strategically. He takes in the minds of the house again, incrementally, and then broadens his reach to the whole of North Salem. Even though it’s not on full blast, the feeling of the current running through his skull is still intoxicating.

“More!” he calls out. He can make out Erik’s frown in his peripheral vision, but the current still ramps up.

He reaches New York City—still well within his natural range, but it’s never felt this way before, the ease with which he can sort through its millions of inhabitants. Mutants jump out at him, brighter, somehow, than the rest of the population, and there are so many in the city alone that he’s nearly breathless looking at it. He stretches east, out to Boston, and west across the state of New York until he hits the Great Lakes. He pushes his mind down the Eastern Seaboard—by the time he reaches Washington, DC, he knows that he’s gone beyond the distance he could ever reach unaided. The capital spreads out before him, all those minds, rushing around, mutants shining in every corner of the city. It’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

The current starts to decrease, slowly, before it peters out completely, and Erik is gently lifting the helmet from his head and smoothing down his hair before pressing his lips to the crown of Charles’s head.

“That went better,” he says, his words half muffled.

“That was _incredible_,” Charles says. “Here—look.” He shoves his memories of the past hour at Erik all at once, and he stumbles backwards with the force of it.

“There are so many mutants, Erik,” he says. “And we are going to find them all.”

A wave of lust boomerangs between them, and Erik grabs Charles’s jaw with his thumb and forefinger and kisses him firmly. _Thank you for not dying_, he projects, along with visions of increasingly physically improbable things he wants to do to Charles up against the metal panels.

_Anytime, darling, _Charles projects back. He runs his fingers through Erik’s hair and tugs, hard.

Erik makes certain the door to the bunker is sealed shut and tightly locked.

They fine-tune the device in the days that follow, though Erik strictly limits their sessions to no longer than an hour, and no more than twice a day. Raven, Angel, and Armando take turns standing by Charles’s side, jotting down notes as quickly as he can dictate them, and soon they have a list of hundreds of names all over the country.

He catches Erik’s discomfort about the very idea of a list, stray thoughts about how it could fall into the wrong hands—particularly, he worries, the hands of the government. His wariness has its obvious source, but Charles thinks that given the circumstances, this is verging on paranoia, as though any government agents could get past him, let alone the other four residents of the house.

It’s a great irony then, on the fifth day they’ve been using the device, that Charles feels two minds enter the edge of the estate. He gives Erik the cut-off signal and removes the helmet, running his fingers through his hair. Erik gives him a questioning look.

“We need to get upstairs immediately, my friend,” Charles says. “Two CIA agents are driving up to the house.”


	8. Chapter 8

Charles’s study is full of heavy metal objects, but Erik suspects the quickest—if not necessarily the cleanest—way to dispatch of these two would be to snatch the guns at their belts.

_Erik, please_.

Charles isn’t looking at him, and his expression remains resolutely neutral, but he imbues the mental projection with a firm sense of warning. Erik sighs and comes to stand behind Charles’s chair, folding his arms across his chest.

The agents are seated on a couch opposite them, both dressed in the sort of bland, boxy grey suit that seems to be CIA standard-issue. One man, one woman, each watching them carefully. They had introduced themselves when they arrived, but Erik has no memory of their names.

“I appreciate you driving all the way up here from Virginia—that’s quite a distance!” Charles says with a polite smile. He somehow manages to make it sound as if he were the one who invited two government agents into his home for tea and a chat. “But I must admit I haven’t even the slightest clue what this might be about,” he continues. “How can we be of assistance?”

The innocent act is surprisingly convincing, and the male agent looks like he might be buying it, but the female agent is narrowing her eyes in a way that suggests she’s now even more suspicious of them. He has to imagine that any woman who’d managed to break into the ranks of American G-men must be shrewder than most, and he marks her as the most immediate threat.

He feels the press of Charles’s warning again, an uncanny sensation almost like someone putting their thumb on a scale, but inside his mind. He ignores it; Charles is going to be protected, whether he likes it or not.

“Dr. Xavier,” the female agent says. “You’re a geneticist?”

Charles’s smile widens at that, though Erik’s having a hard time figuring out if it’s because he actually wants to talk about genetics, or if he’d like them to believe that he does.

“Yes,” he says. “I work at Cambridge University, though I’m currently on leave.”

“Cambridge,” the male agent says, sounding impressed. He’s a better actor than Erik might have initially guessed. “They do revolutionary work in genetics there, I understand.”

“Some of my colleagues certainly do, yes,” Charles says evenly.

“I’m wondering if you also have a background in physics?” the female agent asks. “Or electrical engineering, perhaps?”

“Not as such, I’m afraid,” Charles says. “The physical sciences are fascinating, of course, but I’ve always preferred…studying living bodies.”

He manages to make the sentence sound like a vague double entendre, and his smile takes on an almost flirtatious slant. Erik is half tempted to break his neutral act to smack him.

The female agent clears her throat. She’s a pro, carefully giving nothing away. She turns her gaze to Erik. “And what do you do, Mr. Lehnsherr?”

“Sales,” he says.

They both look at him for a beat before they realize he’s not going to elaborate.

“And are there other residents in the house?” the male agent asks.

“My sister and two of her friends, yes,” Charles says. He adds, in a tone that’s more prim than Erik thinks is necessary, “They work in the arts.”

It takes all of Erik’s willpower not to laugh at that. Charles leaves him the phantom sensation of a nudge to the ribs.

The male agent raises his eyebrows. “Bit of a motley crew, wouldn’t you say?”

“Well,” Charles says, extending his hands outwards to gesture at the scale of the room. “We have a lot of space.”

There’s a moment of silence, and the agents look at each other, almost as if they’re telepathically—

_They’re not_, Charles cuts through his thoughts. _I’ll explain in a moment, I’m just waiting to see how much they’re going to reveal._

_Charles, tell me honestly_, Erik shoots back. _Are we in immediate danger?_

Charles is silent for a moment, before he projects, quieter than before somehow, even though it’s all inside his mind: _No, but I’m worried that soon, we might be_.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” Charles says. “But surely you didn’t drive all this way to ask us a series of increasingly elliptical questions.” His accent somehow sounds even more posh than it normally does, vowels flattened and consonants clipped; Erik wonders if it’s an affect, or if Charles always sounds like the lord of the manor when he loses his patience.

It seems to have the desired effect: the female agent’s expression grows more serious, and she leans forward and tucks her dark hair behind her ears. “I’ll dispense with the small talk, Dr. Xavier,” she says. “Three days ago, one of our scientists at a secure facility several hundred miles from here brought a series of inexplicable readings to our attention.”

The male agent hoists his briefcase from the carpet and places it on his lap, pulling out a set of papers and holding them up. Erik passes them to Charles, and scans them over his shoulder.

There’s not much useful information—most of the writing is redacted, blotted out with heavy black ink. But there’s a damning series of charts that tell the story of the past week of combining their powers. They’ve apparently been knocking the CIA’s electromagnetic readings completely off the charts, even at this distance.

“What exactly are we looking at?” Charles says.

The female agent frowns. “The scientist who recorded these spikes traced the source back to this area—specifically, to a very small radius around this house. With your sister and her friends in the arts and Mr. Lehnsherr here in…sales…I’m afraid it does fall on you, the scientist, to explain what kind of experiments you’re running here.”

Erik steps out from behind the chair and without pausing to think, says, “I’m responsible for this, not Charles.”

Charles tugs his arm and pulls him back. “We’re _both _responsible for this,” he says, sounding fond and annoyed at the same time. “We’ve been conducting some fascinating experiments with magnets—we had no idea they were producing such wide-ranging results. I do hope we haven’t damaged any equipment—I’m happy to pay in any case.”

“Gentlemen, I’m afraid it’s not as simple as paying a fine,” the male agent says. “We’d like you to come down to Virginia with us for an interview with some of our colleagues.”

Erik opens his mouth to respond, but the female agent cuts in, “It’s not an interrogation. Just a conversation.”

Alarm bells start ringing in Erik’s mind, and Charles places a calming mental wave over them as he stands and claps a hand on Erik’s shoulder. “Agent MacTaggert, Agent Levine, if you’ll excuse us for just one moment.”

He pushes Erik towards the door and drags him halfway down the hall before shoving him into yet another parlor that Erik has never seen before.

“How many parlors does one family need?” he mutters.

Charles ignores him. “Erik, I’m afraid that we’re going to have to go to Virginia.”

“Absolutely not,” Erik says. “I can take care of this easily—”

“You are not murdering a pair of CIA agents in my study!”

“We can lure them outside, perhaps down by the lake—”

“No murdering of any kind!” Charles’s cheeks are flushed, and it’s distractingly endearing, even though Erik understands there are more pressing issues at hand. Charles clearly catches his thoughts and frowns. “It is _not _the time, thank you.”

“Well if you’re so set on keeping them alive, why don’t you just wipe their memories?”

Charles looks at him, wide-eyed, an inscrutable expression on his face. “Aside from whether I would even do that, surely that will point all fingers directly back at us when their agents return with no memory of why they went.”

“So what if it does?” Erik says. “Then you do the same to anyone else who comes to question us. Or better yet, we turn on the device and you knock out all memory of us from here.”

Charles frowns. Erik truly doesn’t understand Charles’s resistance; surely it’s the better alternative to willingly walking into the headquarters of the CIA.

“We don’t know what they’ve written down, or how many people are aware of this,” Charles says. “And I’m not combing through every mind in the entire federal government.”

Erik lets out a frustrated huff. “That doesn’t mean you actually have to comply with these people. It’s the CIA, Charles! Any government agency would be bad enough, but—”

“Look,” Charles says in an uncharacteristically sharp tone. Erik raises his eyebrows. “I’m not any happier than you are that we’re on their radar. But the prudent course of action would be to comply with their wishes. We’re not being taken into custody—they only want to talk with us.”

“Charles!” Erik throws up his hands in frustration. “How naïve can you actually be? Don’t you understand that this is how it starts?”

Charles presses his lips into a thin line. “You can call me naïve all you like. There’s no alternative that won’t draw further suspicion to us. I’m going to Virginia, with or without you.”

Erik grabs him by the shoulder and pushes him against the door, crowding up against him as he hisses, “You are absolutely _not _going to the goddamn CIA headquarters alone.”

Charles leans up to peck Erik on the lips. “Then I guess you’d better pack your bags, darling.”

He twists his arm behind him to open the door and slips through it. Erik follows, watching his infuriating little khaki-and-cardigan-clad form march back towards the study. He makes sure to think very loud thoughts about murder.

*

MacTaggert remains the primary threat. Erik can admit that under different circumstances, he’d admire the woman’s professionalism, so efficient it borders on brusque, especially at seven in the morning. But she is the enemy, and she remains far too perceptive for her own good—not to mention that he can tell that Charles finds her attractive.

Levine’s status as the secondary threat is conditional. On the surface, he’s extraordinarily bland and inoffensive, which Erik counts as a strike against him—he knows just how effectively the CIA uses that sort of persona. He tries to draw Erik into the drudgery of early morning small talk, but he has enough sense to give up by the time they reach Yonkers.

Charles remains politely cheerful throughout, picking up Erik’s conversational slack and then some. By the time they’re on the New Jersey Turnpike, Erik is left wondering, if he were to deliberately crash the car, would he still be able to keep Charles from harm?

They stop for breakfast at a diner, one of those aggressively American establishments with a lot of chrome and formica done up in aquamarine and a sort of flamingo pink. He nudges Charles into the booth first, effectively boxing him into a corner, before sliding in next to him and very deliberately pressing their legs together. Charles is careful not to externally react, but he sends Erik a soft pulse of reassurance.

The agents both order eggs over easy. Erik orders only coffee, until Charles clears his throat and sends him a vague mental nudge imbued with _please eat breakfast like a normal person_.

“Fine,” Erik says. “I’ll also have toast.”

The waitress turns to Charles, who gives her what Erik thinks is an unnecessarily charming smile, considering the circumstances.

“You know, I think I feel like pancakes this morning,” Charles says. “And a large cup of tea, thank you very much.”

_Laying on the eccentric professor routine a little hard, don’t you think? _Erik sends to Charles.

Charles smiles and takes a sip of his water. _It has an effect, you have to admit_.

The perpetual Charles paradox—how much is deliberate manipulation and how much is simply his natural, mildly manipulative state—sits before him, and Charles projects a sort of feeling of rolling his eyes, which feels both bizarre and surprisingly natural.

_For the record, _he adds. _I truly do enjoy pancakes_.

“Mr. Lehnsherr,” MacTaggert says. “How long have you been in the United States?”

He does the quick math, counting from the past summer. “Nine months.” He can’t singlehandedly cut down Charles’s gregariousness with curt responses, but he’s going to try.

“And how are you finding it?” she asks.

“It’s…” He looks over at the rotating pie case on the diner’s counter. “Colorful.”

“I must admit, it’s fascinating to see how much has changed in the decade I’ve been gone,” Charles cuts in. “I moved back to England when I was 19, though even then America felt quite different—Britain had yet to come off rationing.”

Erik would not have chosen to steer the conversation towards the war at this hour in the morning, but luckily the waitress appears with their drinks and it provides enough distraction that he can project to Charles, _Do they know about my past?_

_Not a thing_, Charles says. _Whether they know about Max Eisenhardt’s work with the Israeli government is another story, but if they do, they haven’t made the connection_.

The casual reminder that Charles has dug so deeply through his head gives him the same little twist in his stomach it always does, discomfort at the intrusion twinned, inexplicably, with a sick sort of pleasure. It’s as confusing as all of his feelings about Charles tend to be, and he does his best to set them aside for now.

Back on the road after breakfast, the agents start a low conversation in the front seat, nothing consequential from the snippets he can pick up, but clearly not meant to encompass their guests.

_I needed a break_, Charles confides. Erik glances at him and there’s laughter in his eyes. _They can’t say much about their jobs, we certainly can’t talk about what we’re doing, and frankly, without your help, we were running out of topics of conversation. I don’t actually want to hear about Levine’s boyhood in Rhode Island._

_So you…? _Erik wiggles his fingers in a vague sort of gesture, and Charles chuckles softly.

_Gave them a strong suggestion to talk amongst themselves, yes. _He leans his head against the back of the seat and closes his eyes. _You were right. That was possibly too many pancakes._

Erik snorts; he hadn’t said anything aloud, but he’d eyed the enormous stack the waitress had placed in front of Charles with extreme skepticism.

Charles doesn’t say anything more, and after a few moments Erik looks over again and sees that he seems to have dozed off, the long length of his neck on display, his hair looking so soft that Erik’s itching to reach out and touch it. He takes a shallow, steadying breath and turns towards the window, where the bleak industrial landscape is dropping away, replaced by more and more early spring green.

Perhaps he should be more concerned that he’s willing to walk into the lion’s den for this man. Since his partnership with Emma began, he’s always had her back; he’d never hesitate to fight for her, or Azazel and Janos, or any of the mutants they’ve brought under their protection. But it’s hard to envision a circumstance, were it anyone but Charles, that would have him willingly strolling into the headquarters of the CIA, save some sort of rescue mission—or, better yet, an assassination order.

Charles is a genius, but he’s also a fool, and that foolishness is compounded by his arrogance. He can literally read minds, but he remains convinced of humanity’s inherent goodness—even when the world has offered an extraordinary amount of evidence to the contrary.

“You’re right,” Erik had whispered against Charles’s bare shoulder in the early hours of the morning. “I can’t see what’s in people’s heads—I only see what they do. Forgive me for drawing certain conclusions from that.”

“Your pessimism is—”

“It’s not pessimism,” Erik had cut in. “It’s realism.”

They’d both woken up far too early, spurred by the creeping unease ricocheting between them. Everyone had gone to bed frustrated the night before; after Charles had sent the CIA agents off, the whole house had replayed the exact same argument about going down to Virginia. In the end, Charles had high-handedly ended the entire conversation—and the tissue-thin detente he and Mystique had managed over the past week had definitively vanished.

A sliver of light was peeking through the heavy drapes in Charles’s bedroom. They didn’t have long before they needed to actually get up and prepare for the trip, and Erik would have liked to spend it engaged in more diverting activities than digging into their perpetual ideological stalemate, yet somehow, here they were.

“Cynicism,” Charles corrected lightly. He was tracing the pads of his fingers along Erik’s forearm as his mind nudged up against Erik’s, a gentle embrace. “You don’t see humanity’s potential for change. Progress can be slow, painfully slow sometimes, but it happens. It _will _happen.”

Erik pressed a kiss against Charles’s shoulder then, resting his lips against the soft, warm skin before saying, “And where does that leave us, while we wait for the world to catch up?”

Charles had pulled back and watched him for a long moment, eyes unreadable in the low pre-dawn light. Whatever Charles saw there, with his eyes or with his mind, remained a mystery, because instead of responding he leaned in and kissed Erik, long and deep and utterly distracting, pulling their bodies flush and rocking his hips forward.

As they make the crossing through Delaware, Erik revisits the rest of the morning in detail, lingering over the expression on Charles’s face, sweat-slicked hair falling in his eyes, as Erik gripped his hips and Charles rode him slowly, almost with a sort of certainty, the lock between their minds and bodies feeling like something solid and deep.

Charles manages to wake up precisely as Erik’s remembering the moment of climax, and as he groggily dips into Erik’s mind, his eyes widen and he immediately blushes.

_I cannot believe you’re thinking about this morning while those two are a foot away_.

_Unless I’m mistaken, there’s only one telepath in this car_.

Charles adjusts himself in his seat, subtly but noticeable enough, and gives Erik a petulant look. _I’m lifting the distraction order_.

_Wait, Charles, no—_

“We were just discussing film,” Charles tells the agents, smiling serenely, as if he hadn’t sent them into a sort of conversational fugue state for more than an hour. MacTaggert twists around with an interested expression on her face, and Erik inwardly curses. “Did you have a chance to catch _Lawrence of Arabia _at the cinema?”

Somewhere outside of Baltimore, when Charles changes the subject to pop music—apparently something Levine and MacTaggert both enjoy a great deal, and love to imitate—Erik knows for certain that it’s meant specifically as a punishment for him.

*

If there’s a sure sign that they’re in trouble, it’s the fact that they’ve brought the actual director of the CIA to the meeting. He vaguely recognizes McCone from his picture in the newspapers—middle-aged, trim, with close-cropped silver hair and a sort of impatient, weaselly look about him. His secretary takes a seat against the wall behind him, pencil poised over her notebook.

Erik’s mostly forgotten the rest of the agents’ names, though he can remember that the dark-haired, heavyset man in the slightly rumpled suit is the head of the facility that picked up the readings. He looks more intrigued with them than anything else, which is slightly unsettling against the calculated glances that fill the room, and Erik files him away as a wildcard.

Between the haircut, the posture, and the general air of hawkish annoyance, the man to the right of McCone is clearly ex-military. The other three agents would give Levine a run for his money if there were some sort of competition for innocuous-looking government suits—fair-skinned, dark-haired, faces that you wouldn’t be able to pick out of a crowd. All four of them are marked as threats; it seems like an unnecessary amount of firepower for what’s been billed as a friendly chat rather than an interrogation.

And then there’s McCoy, the one who actually took the readings, who’s watching them with an expression that somehow manages to be eager, shy, and nervous all at once. He looks all of fifteen, though perhaps it’s just that his thick-rimmed glasses and the white lab coat on his gangly frame give him the air of a little boy in a scientist costume. He also gets a threat designation, if for no other reason than it looks like he would fold if you so much as glared at him.

Charles is almost certainly rifling through all of their minds, but if there’s anything that’s setting off bigger alarm bells than “we’re being interrogated by the head of the CIA,” he doesn’t show it, nor does he offer Erik any telepathic clues.

Erik leans back and crosses his arms, though he still lets his power rest lightly on every scrap of metal in the room, some of it obvious, some that would take a little creative thinking. Charles can take the lead, and he’ll handle potential fallout.

“Gentlemen,” Charles says, smiling and spreading his hands in a gesture that encompasses the entire table. “And Agent MacTaggert, of course.” He nods at her and she gives him a fond look even as she rolls her eyes. Erik bumps her back up to threat number one.

“Dr. Xavier and Mr. Lehnsherr were kind enough to come down to Virginia,” MacTaggert says, her tone making it clear that it was not their idea. “It was Dr. McCoy who took those readings, so perhaps if you want to begin, Dr. McCoy?”

McCoy does not look like he wants to take charge. He swallows audibly and pushes his glasses up his nose. “It was—” He shuffles through his papers until he pulls up what looks like an unredacted version of the report they were shown yesterday. “It was massive—one of the most extraordinary anomalies we’ve ever recorded, of any kind.”

He looks back and forth between them with a strangely expectant expression on his face. Stranger still, Charles is smiling at him—and it’s a more genuine smile than the one he offered the room. Erik expresses an internal questioning nudge for Charles to catch.

_I’ll explain later_, Charles sends back.

“I ran a number of models in my attempt to figure out what could have produced readings like this, but I must admit…” McCoy sighs. “I haven’t come to any solid conclusions.”

“As I told Agents MacTaggert and Levine,” Charles says. “We were conducting some amateur experiments with magnetism. I’m genuinely shocked that we would have produced the sort of results that would reach this distance.”

McCoy stares at Charles for a moment, frowning, but he doesn’t say anything.

“With all due respect, Dr. Xavier,” one of the faceless agents says. “Surely you understand how unlikely that sounds.”

Charles puts on his best guileless expression, which is alarmingly convincing. “I certainly do, but that doesn’t change what happened. This isn’t my area of expertise, gentlemen, nor Mr. Lehnsherr’s. We’re as surprised as all of you by the outcome.”

McCone narrows his eyes and leans forward. “What about your area of expertise, though?”

“Pardon me?”

“Genetics,” McCone says. “Harper here has read your work in detail.” He gestures to one of the other faceless agents, who nods. “Speculating about humans with fantastical abilities.”

“Yes, my theoretical work,” Charles says smoothly. “I’ll stress that unfortunately for the time being, it’s just that—theoretical. But I’m more than happy to talk to you about the biological underpinnings—”

“_Theoretically_,” McCone cuts in. “Do you think a man could be born with the ability to, say, damage our electromagnetic equipment with…with his mind? Or with, say, magnetized blood?”

Erik scoffs internally; he doesn’t have a firm scientific explanation for how his power works, but both of those suggestions are absurd.

Charles gives him an indulgent smile. “I suppose anything’s possible,” he says, managing to stress just how unlikely that sounds with his tone. McCone frowns.

“Mind-reading, though,” the military man says, and Erik carefully schools his expression so it doesn’t reveal a thing. Charles blinks at him.

“What about it?”

“That’s one of your theoretical, what do you call them…mutations?” His eyes narrow. “You think that there are people who read minds? Or control them?”

Charles laughs lightly. “Again, theoretically! And certainly not anytime soon—we’re talking about potential evolutionary advances that stretch centuries into the future.” He pauses and brushes what Erik is certain is imaginary lint from the sleeve of his suit jacket. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, gentlemen, but I’m afraid today’s mind readers are strictly relegated to B-movies and dime-store comics.”

There’s a shift in the atmosphere of the room, expressions collectively hardening, and Charles can surely feel the ramped-up hostility twice-over in his mind.

Charles claps his hands together. “I’m so sorry I can’t give you better answers than that. But if that’s really all you wanted to ask about—”

“Let’s go back to hypotheticals, then,” McCone interrupts. “Say these people did exist today. What sort of lives would they be leading?”

“Oh, all sorts, I suspect,” Charles says slowly, as if he’s trying to follow a thought experiment through. “My research suggests these mutations will be randomly distributed—we can expect to find people with advanced mutations in all walks of life, and in all corners of the globe.” He pauses and then puts on the full professor voice to add, “I say advanced, of course, because we’re all mutants, when you get right down to it. Agent Harper’s green eyes, for example, or Agent MacTaggert’s auburn hair. That’s the MCR—”

“No, go back to the advanced mutations,” the military man cuts in. “The ones with really advantageous powers—they’ll want to put them to good use. Serve their country. Especially right now, when the need is so great.”

“I imagine they’d be as likely to choose that path as anyone else with exceptional abilities,” Charles says. “Cleverness, physical strength, agility, other relatively common talents—some people use those gifts in military and government roles, but many others don’t.”

The question is sitting there in plain sight, and Erik is desperate to know how much of this speculation is bluffing and how much is based on real knowledge that mutants exist. There’s no doubt that they suspect that Charles is one—and he’s likely pulled in by association.

He’s offered his powers to a government agency before, in circumstances he deemed mutually beneficial; he’s also had them taken from him, conscripted rather than volunteered, and if any government seems likely to pull mutants into an arsenal against their will, it’s the Americans.

The small force they’ve been building is powerful, but it’s not nearly big enough to fight this. Not yet, anyway. He feels the pressure of Charles’s mind now, and the phantom sensation of a steadying hand pressing on his shoulder.

“Is _that _everything, then?” Charles asks. He looks around the table expectantly. The faceless agents are, unsurprisingly, wearing their professionally neutral expressions, but MacTaggert is watching them with a frown.

McCone stares at Charles for a long moment, his lips a flat line, before he nods and stands. “We’d like to keep in touch, Dr. Xavier. Agent MacTaggert here will give you the details.”

The agents stand in a flurry of motion and make their way towards the door, save MacTaggert and Levine, who are arguing quietly while employing small but forceful hand gestures, and McCoy and his boss, who looks like he’s about to say something to them before glancing at the retreating agents and shaking his head.

“Thank you for coming all the way down here for such a brief meeting, gentlemen,” he says instead, extending a hand to each of them.

McCoy hovers behind him, looking almost comically uncertain, and then his attention suddenly fixes on Charles, his eyes wide.

_Did you just talk to him telepathically?_

_Yes_, Charles says, his mental voice brisk. _Hang on, until we’re alone_.

“Dr. Xavier, Mr. Lehnsherr,” MacTaggert says, ushering them towards the door. “I imagine you’ll want to take the train back to New York, or we can book you a flight—”

“We’d just like a ride into Washington, if you don’t mind,” Charles says quickly. “We’ll take the train back up tomorrow.”

As they follow the agents through the labyrinthine corridors towards the lobby, Erik leans into Charles’s personal space, taking in the tense set of his shoulders.

_You see now that I was right, _Charles says. _We don’t have the numbers to fight this_.

Erik tugs on Charles’s arm angrily, yanking him back as the agents walk on.

“Is this just about you gloating, Charles?” he says through gritted teeth.

“No, it’s about both of us being wrong, at least a little bit,” Charles says, keeping his voice low and urgent. “You were right, too—they’re going to come for us, and soon.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The third and final ridiculously beautiful illustration is once again by **[araydre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/araydre/pseuds/araydre)**. You can see all of them [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21320869/chapters/50775106)! araydre, thank you so, so much. <3
> 
> Also a quick content note: I’ve added a “mind control” tag to the story, which is especially relevant in this chapter.

Charles has Agent MacTaggert drop them at the Fairfax. Erik is antsy beside him as he pays for the room, so Charles sends him ahead to do the security sweep he’s obviously itching to perform.

“It’s clear,” Erik announces when Charles enters the room and shucks off his suit jacket, tossing it on the bed closest to the door. Erik is standing by the window and scowling down at the street, and even without actively dipping into his mind, Charles can feel the worry—overlaid with protectiveness and topped off with a hint of paranoia—radiating off him.

“Unless it’s changed significantly since my childhood, this place is always crawling with diplomats,” Charles says, sitting heavily on the edge of the bed. “We’ll be fine until tomorrow.”

Erik crosses the room with his hands on his hips and all but looms over him. “And tomorrow, then? What the hell is going on, Charles?”

Charles loosens his tie and starts to unbutton his waistcoat. “Quite a number of troubling things, to put it mildly.”

“Put it plainly, then,” Erik snaps back. “This isn’t a time for prevarication.”

“Plainly, then,” Charles says, glaring up at him. “One.” He holds up a finger. “They know mutants exist. Two.” He adds a second. “They seem particularly interested in telepathy. And three—” He lowers his hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. “We are far closer to nuclear war than the papers are reporting.”

“How long have they known about mutants?” Erik says, his tone carefully controlled even as Charles can feel the panic underneath.

“McCone and Stryker—the one with the sunny disposition—have only been briefed recently, as far as I could tell,” he says. “Neither MacTaggert nor Levine know about any of this—they truly believed that they were bringing us here for the stated reason. Everyone else in the room has been aware of the existence of mutants for nearly a year.”

“How much do they know?” Erik says, frowning.

“I was combing through their minds as quickly as I could in such a short space of time, but I managed to get glimpses of sightings they were investigating.”

Charles pauses; he knows Erik won’t like the rest. But Erik gives him an impatient “go on” sort of gesture, and Charles sighs. “They saw a red-skinned man who vanishes into thin air,” he says slowly. “And a woman who can turn to diamond.”

Erik’s panic spikes, crackling in the air. “Did they—”

Charles can pick up the thread of the thought without reading his mind. “No, none of them had any thoughts about a man who could control metal.”

Erik’s shoulders drop slightly at that, and Charles takes his hand and tugs him around until he’s seated on the opposite bed. He weaves their fingers together, and Erik gives his hand a squeeze.

“No one actually had any substantive ideas about our electromagnetic outburst either,” Charles continues. “Well, beyond thinking we were building some sort of terrible weapon.”

“They aren’t going to leave that alone,” Erik says. It’s a statement, not a question. Charles shakes his head.

“To be clear, they strongly suspect that we’re mutants, too. Me in particular, due first and foremost to my thesis, as well as the research I’ve been conducting for the past year.”

“Why are we here, then?” Erik’s voice is edged with impatience. “We should be heading back to New York immediately, briefing the others and regrouping as soon as we’re able—”

“Ah,” Charles says. “I misspoke a moment ago. Nearly all of the people in that room have known about mutants for the past year. But Dr. McCoy has known about them—well, about one mutant, anyway—for his entire life.”

“He’s a mutant?” Erik’s surprised pleasure radiates outwards, and Charles allows himself a moment of grateful affection for their shared delight over mutation, and mutants themselves.

“I’ll grant that he has a lot of shame wrapped up around it,” Charles says, and Erik’s expression darkens along with his thoughts. Charles holds up a placating hand. “He’s a mutant all the same, and even if he wasn’t, he was the most brilliant person in that room by a mile, and he doesn’t seem particularly happy with the direction their research is headed. I asked him to come and speak with us tonight, if he can get away.”

“And will he? If he’s ambivalent about—”

“No,” Charles cuts in. “I think he will.”

Erik’s mind is a muddle of thoughts about imminent threats and weaponizable mutations and digging through peoples’ heads and then, a small point of clarity, the memory of Charles sitting at that long wooden table, perfectly controlled at every moment, lips pursed and gaze even as he refused to let the director of the CIA intimidate him in any way.

Charles takes a deep breath. “Look,” he says. “I know we’ve argued this to death, and I know what you think of me.”

Erik opens his mouth to interrupt, but Charles holds up his free hand.

“Literally!” he continues with a laugh. “That, you’ll admit, is undeniable. But I hope you understand now that my desire for pacifism isn’t an unwillingness to defend ourselves, and that my inclination towards prudence isn’t mere cowardice.”

Erik watches him for a moment, his mind still churning. He respects Charles—that much is easy to see even without unpicking all the strands—and his protective instincts are just that, instincts, things he finds easier to push back into his subconscious than examine too closely.

But there remains a single, lingering seed of doubt—whether, when the time comes to make the hard choice, Charles will be able to do what needs to be done. In the sorts of minds Charles dips in and out of every day, that hypothetical hard choice would be a formless worry, impossible to articulate and powerful in its ambiguity; in Erik’s mind, a place where every contingency plan has its own contingency plan, he sees dozens of branching potential moments of disappointment, so many spaces where that doubt can linger.

Charles hasn’t been this deep inside someone’s mind since the last few years before Raven kicked him out of her head. He tries to imagine what the past month would have been like without that access, that intimacy—if Erik had bristled against his telepathy, and closed ranks around his thoughts. He has Emma Frost’s lack of boundaries to thank, at the very least.

He decides to spare Erik a serious conversation about Charles’s trustworthiness or lack thereof—not least because he’s fairly certain he won’t like the end result. He knocks their knees together as he says with only a hint of forced joviality, “Never mind—shall we get something to eat?”

The restaurant downstairs is a sea of dark wood and heavy carpeting. It’s apparently popular with passing film stars, but they’re seated next to a group of boisterous men who Charles learns, after a quick peek, are a congressman, a diplomat, and a trio of pharmaceutical executives. Their thoughts are as loud as their voices, and Erik entertains fantasies of stabbing them with their own tie clips.

“Americans,” Erik mutters as he opens the wine list.

“I’m American, you know,” Charles says with a teasing smile.

Erik gives him a withering look and returns to the menu.

Charles tries his best to block their neighboring party out; there are whispery undercurrents about the nuclear situation in the worried thoughts of a good portion of the restaurant, though most of it is far more abstract than the things he saw in McCone’s mind earlier that afternoon.

By necessity, they keep the conversation light; they have much to discuss, but there’s little they can say aloud, and Charles is certain that conversing only via his telepathy will look more than a bit odd to the waitstaff.

They return to the room after dinner, and Erik pours out two drinks from the bottle of scotch he’s commandeered from the hotel’s bar.

“Remind me,” Charles says, accepting the glass with a nod of thanks. “What did Emma say when you last spoke with her, when you lost the line?”

Erik sits in the opposite chair and takes a long sip of his drink. “Very little of substance, unfortunately. That they were in Hungary, and that Azazel had sources ‘on the ground’ that marked the nuclear threat as more serious than we’d been hearing.”

“Azazel is Russian?”

“Yes,” Erik says. “Though he seems to have as much national loyalty to the Soviets as Emma does to the Americans.”

“Can’t compete with the international mutant cause,” Charles says lightly as he takes a drink.

Erik is looking at him with a gravely serious expression. “Well, yes,” he says slowly.

Charles kicks himself internally. He’s never felt particularly tied to the United States or the United Kingdom, but then, he’s never been branded as an enemy of the state by either of them, or forcibly ejected from his home by his fellow citizens. Of course Erik would find solace in the idea of a collective mutant race.

He’s grappling for the right thing to say in response when there’s a knock at the door. Erik looks over with a frown.

“Is that—”

Charles checks and nods as he stands to cross the room. He opens the door and Hank McCoy is standing there, flushed and radiating nervous energy.

“I’m so sorry, Dr. Xavier,” he says in a rush as Charles ushers him into the room. “Agent Black took me to dinner. We don’t come up to DC very often, even though the facility isn’t too far away, and I wasn’t able to get—”

“Really, Hank, don’t worry,” Charles says, clapping him on the back. “We’re happy to see you.”

Erik nods in acknowledgment, though the expression on his face is less happiness and more coolly detached skepticism.

“Hello, Mr. Lehnsherr,” Hank says, giving off even more nervousness, plus an added touch of fear.

“Drink?” Erik says, holding up his glass and giving it a little shake.

Hank hesitates for a moment before shaking his head. “No, thank you. I need to keep my wits about me.”

The anxiety Hank is projecting is becoming distracting, so Charles cheats a bit and sends him a strong calming wave, leading him gently to the sitting area and nudging him into a chair. Charles sits on the sofa and gives Hank his most encouraging smile.

“Well then,” Charles says. “You already know about my mutation. Erik, perhaps you can show him yours?”

Erik gives them a satisfied little smile as he plucks Hank’s cufflinks from his shirtsleeves and juggles them in the air. Hank’s eyes widen in recognition.

“You can manipulate electromagnetic fields,” he says in a rush of exhalation.

Erik raises his eyebrows and his smile grows into something more genuine. “I’ll admit I’m impressed. Most people assume it’s just control over metal.” He gestures for Hank to hold out his hand and he drops the cufflinks into his outstretched palm.

Hank ducks his head shyly as he shifts to shove the cufflinks in his pocket. “Thank you, but it’s only because I’m working with the given data—it’s obvious you two were behind those readings, I just couldn’t figure out how you did it.” He pauses and pushes his glasses up his nose, looking at Erik with a speculative gleam in his eye. “Are you able to use your powers to fly?”

Erik scoffs as he takes a sip of his drink. “I don’t think—”

“I’m fairly certain you could,” Hank says. “If you’re strong enough to amplify Dr. Xavier’s powers all the way to—”

“Hang on,” Charles cuts in. “How did you know he was amplifying _my _powers?”

Hanks expression clouds. “I wasn’t sure if you’d already read it from my mind earlier,” he says. “But I used the electromagnetic readings to as a decoy—I needed to divert Agent Black and the others from the massive amount of psychic energy you sent out into the world.”

Charles’s lips part involuntarily, and Erik’s surprise echoes through his skull. “What do you mean?” Charles demands.

“You didn’t know about this?” Hank says, frowning. “God, I’m sorry, Dr. Xavier, but—”

“Calm down, Hank,” Charles says firmly. “Please, just start from the beginning.”

Hank takes a deep breath. “OK, well. I work for the OSI, and the division investigates a lot of, well, far-out ideas, you might say.”

“Science fiction,” Erik says, his tone skirting up against derisiveness, but Hank nods earnestly.

“Sometimes, yes,” Hank says. “But this—it’s a large project, and they’ve been working on it for years, since just after the war. All sorts of experiments with drugs, hypnosis, that sort of thing. Dozens of universities are involved, though many of them don’t actually know they’re working for the CIA. They’re looking for a sort of…truth-telling formula, I guess, to force a confession out of you. But they’re especially interested in—”

“Mind control,” Charles finishes slowly, as he rifles through Hank’s knowledge of the operation. “The scale of it all…this is absurd.”

“But about a year ago,” Hank continues. “Right around the time when field agents started to notice powered individuals, someone got a hold of your thesis, Dr. Xavier. All the stuff they’ve been doing, it’s mostly just drugging people—honestly, it’s closer to torture than anything else. It’s terrible. But when your thesis proposed a genetic potential for _true _mind control—”

“My God,” Charles mutters. “So they set you hunting for actual telepaths?”

Hank nods. “The thing is, as far as I know, I’m the only person at my facility with an extreme mutation, like the sort you were describing. I suspected, when I read your work, that you weren’t just speaking in hypotheticals. So I built a way to measure psychic energy—”

“And it worked? That’s truly remarkable, Hank,” Charles says. Hank blushes.

“But I didn’t know if it would work, or how would I know if it worked—I didn’t think it would ever be triggered,” he says. “Luckily you managed to set off two alarm bells at once the other day. So…I made one a diversion.”

“Thank you for that,” Charles says. “We really do appreciate it.”

“Telepaths.” Erik’s mouth is set in a thin line, and when Hank turns to him, he shrinks under his gaze. “What do they intend to do with them, if they catch them?”

“I…” Hank frowns. “I have to admit I don’t know what’s actually happening with the Soviets, but there are whispers that things are melting down—uh, poor choice of words, sorry. All I know is the OSI has been asked to step up our efforts on this front. They want telepaths to fight the Russians, whatever that would actually mean in practice.”

Erik has a sudden vision of Charles strapped to a chair, some tall, faceless figure barking orders at him, and it’s so jumbled with memories of his adolescence that Charles can’t help but wince.

_They don’t have me yet_, he projects to Erik, but Erik just narrows his eyes and shakes his head.

Charles looks back at Hank, who’s watching him nervously, as though he’s somehow responsible for all of this. He pushes into his mind, straight past his daily ambivalence about his job, the love of science warring with uncertainty about the work he’s being asked to pursue, and down to something deeper—his mutation, his biggest source of shame. It was the easiest thing to blame during a childhood with parents who valued what was normal—despite their precocious son who was anything but. There are echoes of Charles’s own childhood, but only faint ones; Hank’s parents at least loved a version of their son, one who kept his shoes on and tried to play with the other boys.

“Hank, how would you like to come up to New York with us tomorrow?”

Hank stares at him, his mouth falling open slightly. “But…but how would I—”

“We’ll collect you on the way to the station, first thing in the morning,” Charles says. “I can impress upon Agent Black the need for you to take indefinite leave; it’ll be non-negotiable.”

“You can do that?” Hank says breathlessly.

“Mind control, remember?” Erik says, and there’s something threatening in his tone as he taps his temple. “You’re all so keen on it.”

_Hank’s not, _Charles admonishes him. _Please don’t frighten the boy._

_He’s been working for them, Charles!_

Erik’s face is so stormy that Hank can surely tell they’re having a silent argument. He looks back and forth between them with wide eyes.

_He literally diverted them away from us not two days ago_, Charles shoots back. _We need allies wherever we can get them. And besides, he’s a mutant and as I said, he’s absolutely brilliant_.

Erik sends back a wordless sort of acquiescence and stands with a huff to refill his glass.

Charles turns back to Hank. “Well?”

Hank looks slightly dazed but he nods and says, “Yes, I’ll come.” He looks at Erik anxiously before turning back to Charles with a tentative smile on his face. “Honestly, I’d like to see the device that caused all this trouble in the first place.”

*

They reach Westchester by early afternoon. Armando is waiting for them, leaning against a gleaming silver Rolls-Royce that looks wildly incongruous against the sleepy train platform.

“Hope you don’t mind, Doc,” Armando says, nodding back at the car. “But the keys were right there in the garage, so…”

“Goodness, no, I don’t mind at all,” Charles says. “It must’ve been my stepfather’s, so you’re welcome to do whatever you like with it. Drive it into the Hudson, for all I care.”

Erik raises an eyebrow at him, but Armando only laughs and claps him on the shoulder. “Are you serious? This baby’s a beauty, I’m not crashing her into anything.”

Hank is friendly but extraordinarily shy as they make their introductions and get in the car, forced into the passenger seat with the longest legs of the three of them.

On the train, Charles had felt like he’d been successfully chipping away at Hank’s bashfulness, engaging him in a wide-ranging conversation about the sciences as Erik alternated between watching them skeptically and pretending to ignore them entirely in favor of the scenery. But now, as Charles briefs Armando on the trip, Hank’s mind is hovering over diffidence again.

“So you let these two kidnap you?” Armando says, flashing Hank a teasing smile.

“No!” Hank says quickly. “They didn’t do anything wrong!” He sounds so panicked that Erik lets out what sounds like an involuntary laugh. Charles reaches across the back seat to give him a tiny shove.

“I’m kidding, man,” Armando says. “But you _are _a mutant, right? What’s your power?”

Hank mumbles something incomprehensible. Charles clears his throat and contemplates giving him a little mental encouragement, before Hank says, in a rush, “I have prehensile toes.”

“So they grip like fingers?” Armando says. “My feet can do that, too, if the need arises.”

Hank stares at him in open-mouthed shock. “Really?”

“Adapt to anything!” Armando says with a laugh. “If I need it, my body will create it. I can’t hold onto that shape forever, though—that’s very cool that you can. You’ll have to show me what you can do with your shoes off.”

Hank’s projecting equal parts disbelief and wonder as Armando draws him into a conversation about his mutation. Charles glances over at Erik and catches his gaze. The corners of his lips are only turned up by the barest fraction, but his mind is coalescing around warm thoughts of mutant solidarity.

There is more to collecting mutants than building an army, and Charles will be damned if he can’t get Erik to admit as much.

_After all this_, Charles projects. _What will we do?_

Erik’s smile dims and his thoughts turn protective, like pulling a coat tighter against the chill. _One thing at a time, Charles. We have to make sure the CIA doesn’t kidnap you in the night._

Charles rolls his eyes and is about to respond when Hank blurts out, “You _live _here?”

Inside the house, Armando guides a gawking Hank up the main staircase to choose a bedroom, while Erik manhandles Charles in the opposite direction, pulling him into the ground-floor study. He locks the door with his powers.

“We need a place to start strategizing,” Erik says, gesturing to the room. He’s envisioning spots where they can tack up maps. Charles thinks it might be prudent to set up shop in one of the dozens of other suitable rooms, since they’ve mostly used this one to play chess and, inevitably, screw around—granted, usually only up to the point where one of them gathers their wits long enough to move things to Charles’s bedroom.

Before he can say as much, someone’s banging on the door—Raven, he can tell, even without dipping into her mind.

“Let her in,” he tells Erik. “We’re going to have to tell them eventually.”

Erik frowns but unlocks the door anyway, leaning against the front of the study’s big mahogany desk with his arms folded across his chest.

“Come in, Raven,” Charles calls out.

“What the hell happened down there?” There’s an angry flush high on her cheekbones, and she heads straight for Charles, pressing an accusatory blue finger square in the center of his chest. “You go off with a couple of government agents and we only get one cryptic phone call—”

“We didn’t have a secure line,” Erik says coolly. “And you can save the histrionics—we have work to do. We’re all in danger, but your brother most of all.”

Raven stops short at that, looking between the two of them as her irritation gives way to concern. “What do you mean?”

“Stop that,” Charles says, frowning back at him. “I’m not in any additional sort of—”

“Don’t be foolish, Charles,” Erik snaps. “You think you’re invincible, but they’re specifically targeting you. I won’t have you leaving yourself unprotected because you’re too arrogant to—”

“They’re targeting telepaths, yes,” he interrupts, raising his voice slightly. “But they don’t actually know I am one.” He can feel the final scraps of his patience wearing dangerously thin. “For that matter,” he adds. “They don’t even know if we exist. It’s pure speculation.”

“Based on your _speculative _work?” Erik says, his tone edging up against mockery. Charles concedes he has a point, but he’s not about to say so aloud. Erik’s mind is winding up for a proper fight now. “You only see what you want to see—”

“I don’t deny the urgency of the situation,” Charles says. “But if you insist on treating me like I’m some sort of maiden in need of protection—”

“Jesus Christ, both of you,” Raven cuts in, sounding exasperated. “Just tell me what’s going on and then you can snipe at each other to your hearts’ content.”

Charles sighs, sitting heavily on the sofa and pinching the bridge of his nose. He glances over at Erik, who’s glaring at him. “Fine, fine,” he tells her, waving a hand. “Gather the others—Armando can introduce you to our newest recruit. Meet in the main dining room in ten minutes.”

She stares at him, and then looks back at Erik, before turning on her heel and walking out the door. Erik slams it shut behind her and locks it again, before stalking around to the front of the sofa and looming over Charles.

“This conversation isn’t over.”

His legs are spread slightly, and he leans forward and braces an arm against the back of the sofa, just over Charles’s shoulder. Charles raises his chin as he looks up at him.

“I’m not sure what you hope to achieve with this little intimidation act,” Charles says, pursing his lips. Erik immediately looks down at his mouth before pulling his gaze back up. “Since your accusation was that I’m too arrogant to be appropriately frightened of the government.”

“Are you aware how infuriating you are?” Erik leans forward slightly, bracketing his legs on either side of Charles’s knees.

“I can read your mind, so y—”

Erik claps his free hand over Charles’s mouth. “Shut up.”

Erik’s mind is a muddle of frustration, anger, and fear, underscored by a steady, thrumming lust that Charles can’t help but loop between the two of them. It’s utterly inappropriate to be encouraging this when they need to brief the others in a few minutes, but as Erik presses his palm flat against Charles’s lips, he has a hard time hanging onto that thought.

“You think no one can touch you,” Erik says, his voice low and tightly controlled. “But you’ve never truly been in danger before. You’re untested.”

_What makes you so certain of that?_

“Shut _up_,” he hisses. “What do I have to do to make you—”

The words die on his lips as he freezes, head to toe, and Charles is overwhelmed by Erik’s immediate panic as he holds him still. He shuts Erik’s mouth and has him blink his eyes, twice, and then has him slowly remove the hand covering his mouth.

“In case you need a reminder of what I can _do_,” Charles says.

Erik watches him through wide eyes, and though Charles doesn’t allow his expression to change, he follows Erik’s shifting thoughts as they cycle from shock to anger to something far more complicated, his fury over being trapped undercut by a deeper sort of pleasure at being held this way—specifically, by _Charles _holding him this way. Charles raises an eyebrow.

“We can do this whenever you like, darling,” he says. “If that’s what you’re after.”

He raises a hand and snaps his fingers as he releases Erik from the telepathic hold.

Erik lunges forward, pressing his hands against Charles’s chest, and he pushes so hard it hurts. He ducks his head so their lips are an inch apart, and then projects very clearly: _Fuck. You._

It’s more of an attack than a kiss, Erik biting his lip so hard he nearly draws blood as he rakes a hand through Charles’s hair and yanks it sharply. Charles tries to writhe up against him, raising his hips, but Erik pushes him back down and presses a knee between Charles’s legs.

Erik is physically stronger than him, that much is clear, but he’s thinking muzzy, lust-clouded thoughts about how much he enjoys holding Charles down when Charles has the power to end this at any second. It’s an intoxicating sort of circular logic that makes Charles dizzy.

“Fuck,” he bites out as Erik presses his lips against his jawline. “Erik, I—”

Someone bangs on the door, and Erik instinctively pulls back, breathing hard.

“We’re all waiting for you!” Raven shouts. “What are you two doing?”

Charles takes a steadying breath. “Apologies, we lost track of time,” he calls out. Erik leans down to bury his face against his shoulder, laughing quietly. “Strategizing!” he adds. Erik just laughs harder. Charles swats him in the side.

“Just get in here,” Raven says, sounding extraordinarily annoyed.

“Goddamnit,” Charles mutters, gently pushing Erik off of him. Erik settles next to him on the sofa, breathing heavily.

“Can’t you just…” Erik makes a vague gesture.

“Telepathically distract them while you do even more distracting things to me on this sofa?” Charles leans over and gives him a kiss on the cheek. “Let’s play it safe and resume this later.”

Erik groans and throws his head back.

“Not to belabor this,” Charles says, taking in Erik’s face in profile, lingering on the sharpness of his jawline. “But if you truly enjoy—”

“Can we—” Erik pauses for a beat, not meeting his eyes. “I’d rather not discuss it.”

Charles hums in agreement, and leans over to press a hand against Erik’s cheek and kiss him properly—long, slow, and possessive. When he pulls back Erik isn’t smiling, but his eyes are warm.

“You really are insufferable,” he says.

“I’ve been told as much,” Charles says, patting Erik’s thigh as he stands. “Come on, let’s go make a proper plan so we can be sure the CIA doesn’t kidnap me in the night.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delay! I got swept up writing [my Secret Mutant fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21719431), and then I dragged my beta down with me. :-)

Before he joined Emma and the others, Erik had never been part of a team, not in any real sense. As twisted as the idea was, he suspected that despite the cruelties Schmidt had inflicted on him, the man had fancied himself a mentor of sorts. Schmidt had never revealed his own mutation, but Erik would realize later how often he was referencing it, obliquely, when he told Erik how phenomenal his powers were and how invaluable they’d be in the future, when the war was over.

“You’ll be at my side,” Schmidt had told him once, after Erik had been under his control for nearly a year. Schmidt had given him an almost paternal smile as he said it, holding Erik’s chin between his thumb and forefinger. “We’ll show the world just how formidable you are.”

Erik was close to fifteen then, his body growing rapidly alongside his powers, and while he felt stronger than ever—lifting every rifle in the building and turning it against its owner felt dangerously, gloriously within reach—the idea of the war ending was inconceivable.

And then, on a bitterly cold morning a few weeks later, the Soviets had arrived.

From his vengeful focus in the years immediately following the war to the detached persona he’d found so effective in the fifties, Erik made alliances and cooperated during assignments, but he didn’t do teams, or partnerships, or anything that would leave him beholden to another person or under anyone else’s control.

When Emma found him again in Paris and recruited him into something more substantial than a temporary coalition of common interests, she’d tolerated his attitude for approximately three weeks.

“I know you think of yourself as a one-man show,” Emma had said coolly as she set her glass on the bar. “But this is never going to work if you’re a member of this team in name only.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Erik had said, lighting one of the cigarettes in her silver case.

Emma gave him a flat look before bending forward and plucking the cigarette from between his lips and taking a long drag. Erik sighed and pulled out another from the case.

He did know what she was talking about, though. His unilateral decisions were the reason their quick recruiting trip across the Channel was over before it began; the mutant in question would likely never consent to talk with them again.

Even though it was mid-afternoon, Emma had declared herself done for the day and taken him, with the air of a scolding mother about to discipline her child, to the American Bar at the Savoy. He wondered if she felt at home amongst all the reflective glass.

“Honey, I’m no one’s mother,” she said, blowing a long plume of smoke in his direction. “And I took you here because I wanted a decent cocktail.”

“Fair enough,” Erik said, raising his glass in a mockery of a toast.

“Look,” Emma said, her tone sharpening. “I’m not saying we all need to hold hands and be best friends. But you’re incapable of compromise, and that’s a liability I can’t tolerate. You need to stop thinking of cooperation as showing weakness.”

“I don’t—”

She sighed and tapped her free hand against her temple. “Trust me. You do.”

He had nothing to say to that, the full scope of his thoughts laid bare to a woman who didn’t give a damn how many times he told her to stay out of his head. He drained the rest of his drink and set the glass on the bar.

“What’s next, then?”

Emma seemed to understand that he wouldn’t say the words aloud—and that was good enough for her. She flashed him a blindingly white smile as she raised two fingers to order him a refill.

If he cannot imagine a life in which Emma wasn’t the first mutant he knowingly met, he similarly cannot imagine what he would have done without her hard-nosed pragmatism, the blunt, often impatient way she all but bullied him into understanding what it meant to truly be part of a team—that a whole could be greater than the sum of its parts.

He thinks of it now, as he watches Charles relay the details of their trip to the rest of the group. There’s a great deal of strength at this table, and a pleasing degree of variety, too, but on average, they’re far younger than the team he led with Emma, and they’re inexperienced. Even the fact that Charles is the most powerful mutant he’s ever met doesn’t ease Erik’s worries—especially given Charles’s peace-loving instincts—about how they’ll all fare in a fight.

“Let me get this straight,” Mystique says to her brother, eyes narrowed. “The CIA decided that mutants were real because of your dissertation, and now they’re actively searching for us?”

Charles frowns and opens his mouth to respond, but Hank takes a deep breath and they all turn to look at him.

“Uh.” He pushes his glasses up his nose. “Technically they have empirical evidence that other types of mutations exist, it’s just that they only started to consider the possibility of telepathy…when they read Dr. Xavier’s…”

Charles is giving him an incredibly wounded look. Hank’s mouth snaps shut.

“Regardless of how they found out,” Erik says loudly, bristling all over again at the thought of some smug American government agent watching Emma and Azazel and, presumably, himself. “They know, and there’s no use looking backwards. We need to figure out what to do next.”

Charles looks pleased as he nods and sends over a soft telepathic pulse—no particular emotion, as far as Erik can tell, more of a reminder that Charles is there, inside his head. At this point, Erik is fairly certain that he’s in there constantly, and that he only realizes it when Charles chooses to make his presence known.

As much as it frightens him, he has no intention of asking Charles to stay out of his mind.

“All right, I’ll go first. I think it’s obvious what we need to do,” Mystique says, looking at each of them in turn. “We have to attack them before they attack us.”

Charles sighs, while Darwin folds his arms over his chest, his expression neutral. Angel is giving Mystique a skeptical look.

“And who are we attacking, specifically?” Angel says.

Mystique stares at her for a moment, the corners of her blue lips turning downwards, before whipping around to face Hank. He shrinks back slightly, his eyes wide.

“You’ve been working for them,” she says. “Where would you suggest we start?”

“No, I don’t…” Hank looks at Charles and then back at Mystique, shaking his head. “That’s not a realistic idea. There are only a few of us. Do you know how much firepower the CIA has?”

“Oh, they have someone who can crush guns with a flick of his wrist?” Mystique says, her tone mocking. “Or wipe all their minds with—”

“Raven,” Charles says sharply. “No one is _wiping _anyone’s mind.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Mystique snaps back. “Why am I not surprised? Charles Francis Xavier, the only one who could easily stop this, except oh wait, he’s too busy hiding to actually—”

“Enough,” Erik cuts in. Mystique opens her mouth like she’s about to keep arguing, but he holds up a hand. “No, Mystique—we’re not going to waste time going back and forth on this. Practically, we can’t devise a strategy that’s wholly dependent on one person.”

Mystique scowls at him. Privately, though, he can’t help but agree with her. As Charles catches his eye, it’s clear he’s overheard the thought—he doesn’t manage to smooth over the small expression of betrayal fast enough.

“So Hank,” Darwin says. “This mind-control project you’ve all been working on…”

“I haven’t—” Hank frowns. “It’s not really my area. A lot of it is human experimentation, and I…well I’m not a psychologist, or a biologist, for that matter. I mostly build things.”

Charles leans forward. “I’m aware that they don’t know about your psychic energy readings, but they haven’t asked you to devise some sort of mind-reading device, have they?”

Hank stares at him for a moment, and Charles’s face falls.

“Well technically they didn’t _ask _me—”

“You built a mind-reading device?” Erik says, his tone harsher than is probably necessary, since Hank already looks poised to fall to Charles’s feet and beg for forgiveness at any moment.

“It’s meant to amplify brainwaves!” Hank says quickly. “It would only be a mind-reading device if a telepath used it. I think the effect might be the same as the device you built with Dr. Xavier.”

“You’re quite industrious, Hank,” Charles says wearily, running his fingers through his hair.

Erik folds his arms across his chest. “And we left this technology in the hands of the CIA.”

“I’m 99 percent certain I’m the only one who knows how to use it,” Hank says. Charles looks slightly mollified, but Erik is thinking about that remaining percentage point.

“All right, all right, let’s not belabor this,” Charles says. “We need strategy and we need tactics. We’ve taken preemptively attacking the CIA off the table, yes?”

Mystique looks like she’s about to start yelling at him all over again, but Angel places a steadying hand on her forearm.

“You know as well as anyone how much I’d love to fight those bastards,” Angel says. “But I don’t want to wind up in some cell in a CIA facility that’s not on any map.”

“But we have weapons—hell, we _are _weapons, ones that they can’t match,” Mystique says, the frustration in her voice palpable.

“I know, babe,” Angel says. “But it’s too big a risk. ”

“Some risks are—”

“I don’t know, if we really want to be strategic about this,” Darwin cuts in gently. “We could focus our fighting energy on protecting as many mutants as we can.”

Charles’s face lights up at that, and Erik has to admit that he’s enthusiastic about the idea as well.

“We can build out our ranks,” he says. Mystique nods vigorously as Charles’s smile slips away.

“We can offer our fellow mutants _sanctuary_, Erik.”

A swell of frustration rises up as Charles glares at him, the feeling so strong that he suspects Charles might be projecting some of his own frustration back.

“Fellas,” Darwin says with a laugh, looking between the two of them. “Seems to me that it wouldn’t be hard to do both.”

Charles looks at him, a startled expression on his face. Erik frowns.

“I suppose…”

“We _do _need an army, or some kind of fighting force, anyway—even you can admit that the threat is real, Doc,” Darwin says to Charles, who nods unhappily. He turns to Erik and continues, “But we also need to protect mutants who can’t protect themselves. We can’t all be soldiers.”

“I mean…there’s room in this place for an army _and _a safe house,” Angel says, smiling as she shakes her head. “Probably the population of a small country, too.”

“Exactly,” Darwin says, chuckling. He looks around the table and shrugs. “It all seems pretty simple to me.”

Charles catches Erik’s eye and lets out a sort of startled half-laugh. “Surprisingly simple, yes.”

*

In the week since they brought him back to Westchester, Hank has imprinted on Charles like a baby duckling to its mother. It’s clear that he’s trying to make amends for his work with the CIA, but the boy mostly seems thrilled to receive Charles’s attention and approval.

Charles and his massive ego are, of course, eating it up. But Erik isn’t sure he’ll ever be able to trust Hank, not entirely. The devices he built so thoughtlessly are like bombs, ticking away in some government facility, ready to be deployed by people desperate to exploit Charles and his powers, if only they could figure out how to use them.

“You know,” Charles says one morning as he’s getting dressed. “Tensions in this house are high enough as it is. Perhaps you could consider cutting Hank a bit of slack? Fewer murderous glares, that sort of thing.”

Erik rolls his eyes. He’s seated on the bed, fully dressed—since they’ve come up to Westchester, he’s gotten adept at the art of secretly sharing a bedroom.

They’ve skirted around the conversation about telling the others. Charles is, unsurprisingly, reticent, but Erik is more ambivalent, his annoyance at having to hide warring with his concerns about erecting further divisions in the house at a time when they need everyone unified for the coming fight. It’s yet another thing that’s continually being deferred to some amorphous “after.”

“Am I supposed to be pleased that you have an overeager shadow trailing you around at all hours of the day?” he says.

Charles finishes buttoning his cardigan and turns to face him. “He’s just trying to be helpful,” he says with prim little frown, an expression Erik finds troublingly charming. “In fact, it’s more than simply trying,” he continues. “Hank has made an extraordinary amount of progress in the past few days. The modifications to our amplification device, for one…”

He trails off and his eyes widen, and then he lets out a little huff of disbelieving laughter. “Erik, is it possible that you’re…jealous?”

Erik stares at Charles for a moment in confusion before he asks, “Of who?”

“Of Hank!” Charles is outright laughing now. He crosses the room until he’s standing in front of Erik, hands on his hips.

“How on earth could I possibly be jealous of—”

“No, no, not that way,” Charles says, giving him a teasing shove. “Stop that line of thought, he’s just a boy.”

“He’s not a child, Charles,” Erik says, with only the slightest imitation of Charles in his mock-officious tone. “He’s a government scientist.”

“Come off it, I know you think of him as a boy in your head!” Charles says. “I meant that you’re jealous of our work on the amplification device. You’re worried he’s going to modify it so much that we’ll no longer need your power to operate it.”

“That’s utterly ridiculous,” Erik says, waving a dismissive hand. “Try another one.”

Charles leans forward and presses his hands on either side of Erik’s head, fingers resting lightly at his temples. “For the record, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about,” he says, kissing Erik gently before pulling back.

“I agree,” Erik says, reaching up to brush his thumb against Charles’s bottom lip. “Which would explain why I’m not even remotely worried.”

Charles gives him one of his maddeningly smug smiles and before he can say anything, Erik grabs a fistful of his cardigan and pulls him closer.

He refuses to concede that there’s any shred of truth to the accusation, but as he watches Hank discuss the device with Charles after breakfast, he can’t push away his strange sense of unease. They’re standing over the headpiece, which Hank has altered significantly in the past few days, and Charles’s cheeks are flushed as he gestures enthusiastically and claps Hank on the shoulder.

Erik frowns. Charles glances up and catches his gaze—and has the audacity to wink at him.

He ignores them both and busies himself inspecting Hank’s handiwork on the circuitry, which, if pressed, he’d grudgingly admit is innovative, to say the least. The goal of the modifications is to reduce the amount of both raw power and precise focus required from each of them—Hank has said that using the device should be as simple as picking up the telephone and placing a call.

When the modifications are finished, they’ll begin their search for mutants in earnest, resuming where they left off when the CIA knocked on the door. He and Charles have continued to fight, at length, about the wisdom of keeping a physical list, but Erik can admit that there’s no real way around it right now—someone needs to find these people before the government does.

They’ve spent most of the week preparing the house for more mutants, but Erik’s itching to get back out in the world, searching, and he knows Charles is as well. They sent Angel and Mystique down to the Manhattan house to brief the others, and they returned yesterday with confirmation that the team was ready to help. If only they were able to reach Emma—

“Mr. Lehnsherr?”

Hank’s watching him apprehensively, while Charles pulls on the headpiece and adjusts it as he fixes his hair. He looks up and gives Erik a soft smile.

“We’re ready to give it another go if you are,” Charles says.

Two days ago, Charles used the device to sweep up and down the Eastern Bloc, strapped into the machine so long he’d emerged with a severe migraine that even he couldn’t mask. He’d dismissed Erik’s scolding out of hand, insisting he didn’t need to be coddled, but then he’d spent the afternoon lying on the sofa in the darkened study, which Erik felt was an admission of a sort.

But he refuses to have this fight with Charles every time they need to use the device. He simply says, “You’re certain?”

Charles nods firmly. “I think it’s imperative that we get a hold of her, and soon.”

Erik crosses over to the control panel and places his hands flat against the metal surface. “I’ll count down, then.” Hank ducks his head and hurries to a corner of the room, while Charles closes his eyes, an incongruously serene expression on his face. “Three, two, one—”

He concentrates all his power at the device, and it reverberates through the metal and back at him, creating an intoxicating sort of looping current. It feels like every cell in his body is on fire.

Charles lets out a little gasp, like he always does when the current hits him, and then he’s there, in Erik’s head, everywhere at once, a great tide crashing over everything.

_Think about Emma_, Charles instructs. _I’m going to use your thoughts as a sort of homing beacon._

It doesn’t make much sense, but then, when Charles tries to describe it, so much of his telepathy feels like an abstraction, even when he’s plucking very real thoughts and feelings from Erik’s mind, or filling up every corner of it with his presence.

Erik thinks about Emma, sitting at the American Bar at the Savoy, languidly smoking a cigarette, resplendent in white against a sea of mirrored glass.

_Well, she certainly isn’t there_, Charles says, a sensation of amusement tripping along the surface of his mind. _Not in London at all, nor Paris, as far as I can tell…_

_You need to go east again_, Erik says, trying to push the memory of their last session aside.

Charles is silent as the minutes tick by, and Erik twists around to watch him. His eyes are still closed, and he’s gripping the railing in front of him so tightly that his knuckles are white. Erik loses all sense of time as he focuses wholly on his power and the awareness of Charles’s mind utterly enveloping his.

Hank appears in his line of vision, holding up his arm and pointing to his wristwatch. “It’s been 90 minutes,” he says, his brow furrowed. “You have to cut him off.”

_No_. _Not yet. _

Charles’s eyes are open, and he’s shaking his head, but he’s even paler than usual and the exhaustion is visible in the tightness around his mouth and the slump of his shoulders.

Erik slowly pulls back his power as he removes his hands from the control panel. Charles rips off the headpiece and sways slightly as he steps forward.

“I wasn’t finished—”

Erik holds up a hand. “I won’t stop you from using this thing, but in return you won’t stop me from deciding when to turn it off.”

Charles gives him such a petulant scowl that Erik can instantly envision what he must have looked like as a small boy—particularly how he must have looked when he didn’t get his way. Charles clearly catches that thought, as his eyes narrow and he folds his arms over his chest.

“We’ll try again this afternoon,” he says imperiously, raising his chin slightly.

Erik shakes his head. “We’ll see.”

Hank is looking back and forth between them, clearly unwilling to risk the wrath of whoever he sides against, and then mumbles something about test results and rushes out of the room.

But after lunch, Charles doesn’t bring it up—instead, he heads off with Darwin and Hank, amidst a flurry of chatter about velocity and force that Erik had largely tuned out during the meal.

“I’m going into town to run a few errands,” Mystique says. “Anyone care to join me?”

She’s wearing her standard blond form, but she’s dressed far more conservatively than Erik’s seen before—her stance in New York City seemed to be that if she had to wear clothes, she’d wear as little of them as possible.

Angel’s giving her a deeply incredulous look. “Not if I have to dress like that, babe,” she says.

Mystique rolls her eyes. “You understand what this town is like?”

Angel gives her a flat look. “I do. I’ll pass.” She turns to Erik. “Want to help me train? You won’t believe what I found the other day.”

She takes him to a maintenance shed out on the grounds, one that looks like it hasn’t been used in years. Amongst enough ancient-looking sporting equipment to occupy an entire class of schoolchildren for an afternoon, there’s a small contraption full of stacked clay disks.

“I don’t know what the hell this thing is,” she says. “But I was thinking I could use it for target practice?”

“Actually, that’s exactly what it’s meant for,” Erik says with a laugh. “Clay pigeon shooting.” He shakes his head. “This place is like a parody of itself.”

They set up the trap on the lawn in front of the house, and he shoots her targets while she hovers in the air and spits them down with acid. He can’t help but laugh at the sight of her, shimmering wings catching the mid-afternoon sunlight, spitting down clay pigeons in front of a grand manor like they’re in some sort of fantastical aristocratic hunting party.

When they exhaust one full stack in the trap, Angel comes down to catch her breath. She sprawls out on the grass, propped up on her elbows, and Erik takes a seat beside her.

The long sweep of the lawn stretches before them in a brilliant burst of green, dotted with flowering trees and patches of well-kept shrubbery—it’s properly spring now, and Charles’s estate looks beautiful, for all its ostentation.

Half of him has a hard time imagining any child growing up here, as ludicrous as the house and grounds are, but the other half has an easy time picturing a tiny Charles running across the grass. It’s a great deal of space for one lonely little boy.

After all of this, Charles had said. What will they do, if there is an after? Erik spent most of his adulthood avoiding that question, working under the assumption that he would give his life to accomplish a singular goal. And then he’d killed Schmidt, and the world continued to spin.

“You gotta admit,” Angel says after they’ve sat in companionable silence for a few minutes. “This is a strange turn of events.”

“I don’t know, we were already living in a townhouse on Gramercy Park, paid for by a telepath who can turn to diamond,” Erik says dryly, glancing over at her. “Why not upgrade to a telepath with a castle?”

Angel snorts and tilts her head to look back at him, raising one hand to shield her eyes against the sun. “I don’t…well, I do mean that, I guess. It’s all bizarre. But also I mean, you know.” She gives him a long, inscrutable look. “Your…relationship with…”

Erik goes still, and he looks back out towards the grounds. Angel doesn’t continue, and the silence stretches between them as he grasps for a way to fill it. He clears his throat.

“I’ll admit that when Mystique was so unhappy with the sudden reappearance of her brother last month,” he says slowly, working to keep his tone neutral. “I didn’t think he and I would become such good friends. Not so quickly, at least.”

“Right.” Angel lets the silence hang for a moment again, before she says, “Look, I’m pretty sure you know about Mystique and me, because Charles obviously—”

“Does Mystique know that we know?” Erik cuts in, looking back at her. There’s no use denying that Charles invaded the woman’s privacy.

Angel shakes her head. “I don’t think so. She doesn’t like to talk about him, but… He’s been such a fool around her, there’s no way in hell he’s been reading her mind.”

“He isn’t,” Erik says, though he knows that’s only taking Charles at his word.

“Then that confirms he’s read mine,” Angel says with a sardonic laugh. “Oh, don’t make that face, if I was surprised at this point by a man going where he wasn’t invited—”

“He can’t…” Erik trails off, because he doesn’t really have a defense, just the unsteady sense that they’re now in some sort of strange emotional stalemate.

Angel sits up properly and waves a hand. “Like I said—I’m used to it.”

Erik frowns but remains silent as Angel turns slightly to face him.

“You don’t have to say anything,” she says softly. “But we were friends before either of these ridiculous siblings came into our lives.”

Erik has to laugh at that, and she smiles and shrugs. “So I guess…” she continues. “If you ever decide that you wanna talk about it…”

He looks back out towards the lawn and the edge of the lake, all the way down the hill. When he turns back, she’s watching him carefully, and there’s some sense of understanding in her eyes. He nods, once, and she gives him a little nudge with her elbow.

“Rested enough, then?” he says, standing and brushing his hands against his trousers. He extends a hand down to her and she takes it, pulling herself up and unfurling her wings as she straightens.

“One more stack, and then we find something for _you _to do,” she says. “Maybe there’s a junkyard nearby, we could get you some old cars to toss around.”

Erik laughs and leans over to adjust the trap. He can hear the flutter of her wings. “How—” He looks up and she’s hovering a foot in the air, hands on her hips, waiting patiently for him to go on. “How did you know?”

“About the two of you?” she says. “Are you asking if you’re sending out lustful glances or something?” She lets out a small laugh. “I guess I’m probably a certified expert on men’s lustful glances.”

Erik feels his cheeks growing hot at that, and immediately regrets continuing the conversation.

“No, no, nothing like that,” she says. “I mean, you can’t keep your eyes off each other. But that’s not it.”

He cocks his head in confusion, and she gives him a sort of half-smile.

“It’s like…” She shakes her head. “It’s hard to explain, there’s just something about the way you look at each other. It’s…enormous? I can’t think of another word for it.”

Erik frowns and folds his arms across his chest. “What does that even mean?”

“I don’t know,” she says, but then she continues, her tone finally confident, “It’s like you’ve both found the person that you’d destroy the whole world for.”

*

Charles is distant at dinner, and he’s equally distant during their brief, perfunctory chess game afterwards. As they get ready for bed, Erik watches him undress and then pull on a pair of blue silk pajamas. They’re slightly too large, particularly at the sleeves.

As Charles passes by on his way to brush his teeth, Erik grabs one of the too-long sleeves and uses it to tug him closer. Charles smiles up at him and kisses him slowly and deeply, but there’s no heat to it.

Charles pulls back and gives him a sly little smile. “If I admit that I’m too tired to be of much use tonight, will you spare me the lecture about using the device for too long?”

“Consider yourself lectured,” Erik says, leaning down to kiss him again.

When Charles eventually joins him under the covers, Erik turns off the light with his powers and then rolls over to curl protectively around him. Charles shimmies closer, pressing his body up against his so he’s nearly on top of him, resting his head on Erik’s shoulder.

“Now are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” Erik asks into the darkness. Charles presses his face closer to Erik’s neck.

Charles sighs. “I’m sorry, darling, I’ve clearly been elsewhere this evening. I’m just…”

Erik prods him slightly. “Whatever it is, say it.”

“Don’t overreact,” Charles says, and Erik immediately tenses. Charles snorts into his shoulder. “Incredible how that worked on cue. Please, do me a favor and try to remain calm, but…well, I’m just worried that Emma might be dead.”

“What?” Erik snaps. “Why would you say that?”

“Because I can’t find her anywhere,” Charles says. “I’ve looked in every major city in the Soviet Union, and many towns in between. I’ve been searching for the specific patterns of her mind that I can pick up through your memories. Unless she’s incredibly good at shielding…but then, why would she be shielding herself from me?”

A hundred possibilities flip through his mind, as he tries to come up with an excuse that would ensure she’s still alive—Emma gone rogue, Emma losing a power struggle and forced to do Azazel’s bidding, Emma cutting off ties for her own gain, Emma turned spy for the Russians.

“Then what, her cryptic message last month was some sort of ruse?” Charles says skeptically.

Erik sighs. “I don’t know. I just… She’s not dead.”

“I don’t want her to be dead either!” Charles says. “But I’m increasingly worried about the fact that we can’t find her.”

They lie in silence for a moment, Charles a warm, solid weight holding him down. He places a hand against Charles’s head and rests it there, listening to him breathing in the darkness.

“I’m increasingly worried about a lot of things, to be honest,” Charles says quietly. “But from your stories about her, Emma was a formidable—”

“_Is_,” Erik mutters.

“My apologies,” Charles says quickly. “She _is _a formidable telepath, rather. I’m…” He lets out a small huff of breath. “I suppose I’m simply unused to…”

A beat passes, then two, and Erik shakes his head.

“Thinking of yourself as fallible,” he finishes.

“Well, that’s not precisely—”

“No, that’s _precisely _it,” Erik says. “And it’s what I’ve been saying this whole time.”

“Is this just about you gloating, Erik?”

They’re his exact words from their visit to CIA headquarters, and he curses Charles and his perfect recall as he presses his hand more firmly against Charles’s head.

“_No_,” he says. “Why do you—” He bites back a further response, even though he knows Charles can probably follow the strand of his thoughts even without telepathy.

After a few more minutes of silence, Charles lets out a shaky breath. “I’m sure there’s some other explanation for Emma dropping off the map.”

“Maybe it’s the device,” Erik says, though he’s aware of how flimsy it sounds even as he’s saying it. “Patches you can’t reach.”

“Maybe,” Charles says quietly. He pulls back slightly and gives him a soft kiss on the cheek before resting his head on Erik’s shoulder again. “Maybe.”

Erik lays still for a long time, listening to Charles’s breaths even out and grow deeper as he finally falls asleep. He thinks about Emma—he imagines her in some frigid and telepathically unreachable corner of Leningrad, wearing an excessive amount of white fur, Azazel translating as they dazzle some mutant into joining the cause.

He wakes with a start a few hours later. He uses his powers to read the clock hands on the bedside table; it’s just after two. Charles has migrated off of him, and he’s now lying with his face pressed into the pillow, looking like he’s trying to burrow into the mattress.

He drifts off again, and when he wakes up a second time, it’s because he’s coughing, and he sits straight up to catch his breath. There’s an unidentifiable smell in the air, something odd and slightly too sweet.

It takes him a moment to realize that Charles isn’t in bed beside him. The sheets and pillow where he’d been sleeping are cold to the touch. He instantly knows that something is wrong.

He flicks on the lights with his power and sees a path of evidence from Charles’s side of the bed to the closest window, which is wide open—footprints in the heavy carpet alongside the clear marks of someone being dragged, and a small canister made of an alloy he can’t identify lying on the floor beneath the windowsill.

Charles is nowhere to be seen. Erik stretches out his powers for anything that Charles might be wearing, but that’s foolish, because there was no metal on him when they went to sleep. He climbs out of bed to alert the others, grabbing the shirt he was wearing last night and pulling it on as he marches to the door. They’ll need to search the house and grounds.

But he knows, deep down, that his worst fear has been realized. Charles is gone.


	11. Chapter 11

Charles comes to in a moving vehicle—his eyes are covered with a thick blindfold, but he can still tell they’re driving fast. His hands are bound behind his back, as are his feet, and there’s something heavy on his head that—

He realizes, suddenly, how silent everything is. He focuses wholly on his telepathy, but it’s like grasping at the air. He takes a deep breath and wills himself not to panic.

“Hello?” he says loudly as he tests the strength of whatever they’ve bound him with, squirming as he tries to pull his ankles farther apart. He’s still in the pajamas he wore to bed, but someone’s draped a heavy sort of blanket over his shoulders, and put a pair of rough slippers on his feet. “What’s going—”

“Shut up,” a voice snaps. “And stop moving, or I’ll knock you out again.”

Charles starts at how physically close the voice is—it feels utterly bizarre, hearing a person without at least a passive sense of their mind. He realizes that whatever’s sitting on his head—a helmet, perhaps?—must be blocking his telepathy.

His captor is a man, and he sounds American. Charles stills his feet and inhales slowly. The air is chilly, and it smells overwhelmingly metallic, with the faintest hint of something sweet.

He has a sudden flash of memory, as clear as if Erik was in his head right now: _We have to make sure the CIA doesn’t kidnap you in the night._

He bites back a laugh, because it isn’t funny, not even remotely, but he honestly didn’t think they’d stoop to literal kidnapping—not after he’d been in their headquarters only a week prior. Surely that would have been a far easier place to capture him than in his own home.

And yet. He tries to stretch his telepathy again, hoping for even a hint of it, any whisper of the sense of another mind, but he’s met with a dull, leaden silence. He cannot believe that this is the way everyone else experiences the world—the emptiness of it is terrifying.

The thought of Erik’s voice sends a jolt of a question through his head: Did his captors take Erik as well, or did they leave him sleeping in their bed? For that matter, these people were clearly on the property, and in at least part of the house—were Raven and the others unharmed?

He takes another long, steadying breath and tries to dig deeply into his well of optimism, an admittedly challenging task given the circumstances. The _must_ have left Erik sleeping, because Charles refuses to imagine a scenario in which the intrusion woke him and he put up a fight—particularly one that ended with Charles being taken.

Their vehicle is climbing, and the road is getting significantly curvier; he starts to feel a bit nauseous as the weaving grows sharper. Mountains, then, but which ones? He has no idea how long he was unconscious, or whether they’ve been driving that whole time.

Not that he could tell anyone where he was, even if he could pinpoint the location.

The road gets bumpier and then turns to gravel that crunches loudly beneath the tires, though perhaps it’s just his heightened remaining senses, with both his telepathy and his sight blocked. They come to a rough stop and he pitches forward until he’s caught by a pair of large, strong hands that jerk him upright roughly and then tug him to his feet.

“Come on, let’s go,” his captor mutters next to his ear as a pair of hands untie whatever’s bound his feet together. Two captors, then.

“If you try to run,” a different voice says from somewhere to his right. “We _will _incapacitate you.” Also male, also American—further evidence of the most likely identity of his kidnappers.

They flank him and all but shove him out of the vehicle—the back of a van, it seems—and onto the gravel. The air is crisp and smells like pine.

The two men pull him along the gravel and then onto something hard and even, maybe concrete. They’re inside some sort of building now, and a heavy door slams behind them. An antiseptic smell blankets everything—a medical facility, perhaps?

“This him?” a third voice says, and then he snorts. “Nice PJs.”

Charles would give anything for even a moment of his telepathy back, just to give the man a mental kick.

“Is she here?” asks the first captor.

“Ready and waiting,” the newest voice says. “Take him to room 114.”

They tug him maybe a dozen feet farther and he hears metal scraping along concrete before he’s ushered through a doorway and shoved into a sitting position on what feels like a folding chair.

Fingers scrabble at his blindfold and they manage to tug it free without removing the helmet. The room is extraordinarily bright after so much darkness. He blinks twice and then looks up at his captors. Neither of them are faces he recognizes, but then, it seems unlikely that the field agents they met in Virginia would do the actual dirty work of kidnapping.

“Dr. Xavier?”

Interrogation, on the other hand—Moira MacTaggert is standing in the doorway holding a thick set of files, her lips pursed in a frown. Charles gives her a polite smile.

“So nice to see you again, Agent MacTaggert,” he says. “I’d shake your hand, but…” He shrugs.

Her frown deepens as she steps into the room. She stares at him for a moment before looking up at the two captors.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” she says briskly. “That will be all.”

They leave without a word, closing the heavy steel door behind them. MacTaggert walks around to the other side of the table and takes the seat across from him, placing the files on the table. The CIA seal is stamped on the front, but there’s no other information he can make out.

“I’m sorry about this, Dr. Xavier,” she says quietly.

“Sorry for kidnapping me from my bed in the middle of the night?” he says mildly. “Or sorry for whatever you’re about to do to me?”

She looks away for a moment, and he misses his telepathy fiercely—without it, her face is nearly impossible to read.

“I must say,” he goes on. “If you wanted to chat, all you had to do was pick up the phone—”

“Dr. Xavier, please,” MacTaggert cuts in. She lets out a small sigh. “I hope you can believe me when I tell you I didn’t want it to be this way.”

Charles raises an eyebrow. “And which way is that, precisely?”

MacTaggert leans back in her chair, her expression neutral, and a few beats tick by. He imagines it’s meant to be some sort of intimidation technique, the kind of thing that prompts people to spill their secrets; luckily, he’s an expert at filling up silences with meaningless small talk.

“Setting aside the fact that you presumably drugged and kidnapped me from my own bed, I have no idea what I’m doing…here,” he says, gesturing with his chin in lieu of his bound hands. It’s a blandly utilitarian room, brightly lit, with nothing on the cinderblock walls but a camera mounted to one corner of the ceiling. “If you’re waiting for me to talk, you’re going to have to give me a bit more to go on.”

She maintains eye contact as she straightens the files slightly. After a moment, she says, “You know the CIA has a strong interest in your work.”

He nods. “You all made that abundantly clear. As you can imagine, it was quite flattering to an academic toiling away in obscurity.”

MacTaggert’s eyes narrow. “Look, Dr. Xavier,” she says. “If you answer me truthfully right now, it’ll save us both a lot of time.” She squares her shoulders and raises her chin. “Is your work purely theoretical, or do the highly mutated individuals that you’re describing already exist?”

Forget mental kicks or illuminating blank expressions—_this _is the moment he misses his telepathy most. How much does she know, and how much do her superiors know? He couldn’t see any trace of Emma and Azazel in her mind last week, when the memory of them shone so clearly in the minds of her colleagues. For that matter, none of them had suspected he was a telepath, even if they were certain he must be a mutant of some kind.

But MacTaggert _is _here now, interrogating him at some remote mountain site while he’s tied up with a telepathy-blocking helmet on his head—clearly someone’s put two and two together.

“I’m afraid I’m going to give the same disappointing answer as last time I saw you,” he says evenly. “It’s purely theoretical. B-movies and dime-store comics, remember?”

“But—” MacTaggert lets out a long breath of frustration. He’s certain she’s performing the same hypothetical game as he is, wondering how much he knows, and how much he knows _she _knows.

“I’m sure this is all a misunderstanding,” he says. “This has all been…theatrical, were I asked to choose a word.” He puts on what he hopes is a convincingly guileless expression, and cocks his head to one side. “Though to be honest, I can’t for the life of me understand how this helmet is serving any purpose.”

Her eyes flick towards the helmet for a moment before she meets his gaze once more. She rests a hand on the files, fingers splayed across the seal.

Charles tries again. “Surely you didn’t go to all this trouble just to ask the same questions about my research?”

MacTaggert opens her mouth as if she’s about to say something, then shuts it again, like she’s thought better of it. After a moment, she gives him a tight smile. “I’m sure you’re tired,” she says.

Charles lets out an involuntary laugh. “I wouldn’t know what time it is, but I didn’t exactly get a good night’s rest.”

She picks up the files and holds them to her chest as she stands and walks towards the door. “We can speak more later.”

She’s poised to hit a large red button by the light switch when Charles clears his throat. She pauses and turns back.

“I…” He swallows. “Just, are the others…?”

Her expression doesn’t soften; it barely shifts at all. A few seconds of silence pass, and he’s certain she’s going to leave without saying a word, but then she says quietly, “They’re fine. We only wanted to speak with you.”

Relief floods in, so strong that he can feel it in a physical rush, and he’s about to thank her when she turns her back to him and slams the button. A loud buzzer sounds as she opens the door, and she walks out of the room, saying something to someone in the hallway that he can’t quite make out.

The first captor appears in the open doorway after a moment, holding a helmet in his hand. Though Charles can’t see the one on his own head, he’d bet that they’re the same, or at least functionally similar. The man pulls his on as he enters the room and hoists Charles up by his bicep.

“Looks like we match,” Charles says cheerfully.

“You don’t know when to shut up, huh,” his captor mutters. “Come on.”

He tugs Charles down an equally nondescript, cinderblock-walled hallway, turning right and then right again until they reach an unmarked door with a numbered keypad. He twists Charles’s head away, presumably to divert his line of vision as he types in a code.

They enter an antechamber, and he shuts the first door behind them and sets to work roughly untying whatever’s binding Charles’s hands.

Charles rolls his freed wrists and stretches his fingers. He debates the wisdom of snatching his helmet off and then attempting to remove his captor’s helmet, but the man has at least six inches and fifty pounds on him—he’d probably have Charles on the ground instantly.

“If it were up to me, we would not be keeping the two of you in the same room,” his captor says, keying in a code on the second door. “But these fools are so cheap that they only built the one.” The door buzzes as it swings open.

“Two of…” Charles begins, but the words die on his lips when he sees a figure in a shapeless grey jumpsuit sit upright on a cot at the far wall. There are no windows and only one dull overhead bulb, but her blond hair still glints in the light as she moves.

“Play nice, kids,” the captor says as he shoves Charles, hard, into the room, slamming the door behind him.

Charles straightens and pulls the helmet from his head, and as his cellmate stands and steps forward, he feels the unparalleled sensation of another mind reaching out to his. He’s never felt it before, but he knows, instinctively, that it’s not just someone projecting, but actual, true telepathy. It’s astounding.

He stretches his powers back to her, taking in everything in one heady rush. The woman starts to laugh, and he can’t help but join her.

“Charles Xavier,” Emma Frost says. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

*

Emma wasn’t born with telepathy. She spent the first eight years of her life as a perfectly ordinary little girl—albeit one who lived in a mansion, and whose cool precociousness gave her entry into the adult world at a very young age, from grownup conversations to the glitzy parties her parents continued to throw even as the Depression trudged onwards.

Perhaps it was the way people acted at those parties—something she could spot even then, the veneer of politeness barely masking derision and envy—that shaped her view of the world early on. Realism, pragmatism, cynicism: when she finally learned the words, it hardly mattered, because it was all the same in the end.

And when she woke up one morning and every mind within a ten-mile radius was clanging around in her skull, it was as if every one of her suspicions about humanity had been confirmed.

Charles gets all of this in an instant, brushing through Emma’s childhood like running his fingers along the full span of a book’s pages. The similarities in their backgrounds are a strange coincidence, to say the least, particularly in light of their divergent worldviews. Her mind is spread out before him like some sort of mirror image of his own, and his thoughts involuntarily turn to Erik, the fulcrum between them.

Emma’s eyebrows raise slightly, and a laugh slips out as she folds her arms across her chest. “Of course you did,” she says, shaking her head. “I knew Erik was so inclined, but—”

“Let’s not—” Charles holds up a hand and then makes a vague gesture at the walls, which are strangely shiny, like they’re made of some sort of metal. _Are they listening?_

_Fair point_. Emma shrugs. _There was nothing to listen in on, when I was here alone, but I wouldn’t put it past these bastards._

_Do they know you’re a telepath?_

Emma frowns and nods. _They don’t know about you?_

_They didn’t a week ago, but_— He holds up the helmet. _I have no way of knowing if they do now. Unless…_

She follows the thread of his thoughts immediately. _The room is lined with the same material. They make me wear the damn helmet every time they take me somewhere else_.

Emma has been held in this cell for more than a week, he sees in her recent memories, since they were picked up in Russia by CIA operatives and brought back to the United States. She was immediately separated from Azazel and Janos; they could be dead, for all she knows, though she’s trying not to linger on the possibility.

_I haven’t been able to read any of the CIA people, of course_. She taps the side of her head, recalling a phantom helmet. _And they’re completely useless whenever they try to interrogate me. _She shrugs. _I couldn’t begin to tell you why they’re doing all of this—_

_I can_, he cuts in. _I’d put money on it being part of their dreadful mind-control program_.

He thrusts everything that Hank gave them, in Washington and in the week since, towards Emma in a rush. Her eyes narrow as she presses her lips into a flat line.

_That’s just…_

Charles nods and crosses the cell to the other cot, where a matching grey jumpsuit is sitting folded on top of a thin pillow and blanket in the center of the mattress. He’s hesitant to put it on, but whatever the cell is lined with, it’s not a particularly good insulator—and silk is proving to be a less-than-ideal material for the occasion.

He deposits the helmet on the mattress and picks up the jumpsuit, waving it in her direction.

“Shall I?”

“And take off such a fetching pair of pajamas?” Emma says with a smirk.

Charles grouses and gestures for her to turn, stripping efficiently and pulling on the coarse fabric. It’s much warmer, if significantly less comfortable, and he sends her a cue to turn back around.

“Fits you perfectly,” she says, an eyebrow raised. “It’s almost as if they’ve been planning for your arrival specifically.”

“Almost as if,” Charles says with a rueful laugh. He sits heavily on the cot and runs his fingers through his hair.

He’s exhausted; he has no idea how long it’s been since he was taken, but he’d guess at least six hours, maybe eight. He tries to imagine what Erik is doing right now—hopefully well past the enraged panic stage and onto strategizing, though even thinking about Erik, methodically making plans even as the one thing he actively feared has been realized, leads something inside him to clench painfully.

“Ah,” Emma says. “So it’s like that.”

Charles frowns at her. “Like what?”

Emma chuckles. “You can’t play dumb with me, sugar,” she says, wagging her finger. “Even if you don’t know what I’m talking about, we both know you can read me like a book. Go ahead, rifle around if you want—I promise I won’t fight you.”

Charles purses his lips and nods before he dives in, blatantly dredging through her mind for impressions of Erik. He leaves his own mind open and unshielded in turn—it only seems fair.

He sees their first meeting on the Swiss train, so much richer than in Erik’s own memories, imbued the full perception of a telepath. It’s undeniably a different Erik than the one he knows now—a man with such a single-minded focus on vengeance that it makes him almost fold in on himself, like hunching over and cupping a hand to protect a flame.

He finds Erik again when Emma teleports into his Paris flat, where he’s stewing in a sort of restless, directionless energy; he watches Emma give him that direction, as all his unspent ideas about vengeance become broad visions about the future of mutantkind.

Charles skips along the edges of her memory, catching one false start in their partnership after another, until the day Emma put her foot down and forced Erik to play nicely with others. He can feel Erik’s resistance, and then his grudging respect.

He can recognize the Erik in Emma’s most recent memories—his goals and his dreams and the extraordinary well of feeling simmering beneath the thinnest layer of detachment. He sees Erik the way Emma sees him: a man always standing on the precipice, threatening to inch forward.

“He’s always been passionate, sure,” Emma says dismissively. “But you know that’s not exactly what I’m talking about.”

“If you’re talking about me—”

“Of course I’m talking about you,” Emma says, flashing her teeth as she smiles. “Mr. Precipice.”

Charles feels his cheeks heat up as he rests his elbows on his knees and presses his face into his hands. “Can we please change the subject?” he says through parted fingers.

Emma sends him a faint sensation of pity, almost as if she’s patting him on the head, but when he looks up she’s stretched out on her cot, blond hair splayed across the pillow.

He mimics her, setting the helmet on the floor, which appears to be covered with the same material as the walls. He swings his legs up onto the cot as he lays down. It’s incredibly uncomfortable—the slats manage to poke in precisely the wrong places.

Emma snorts. “Imagine sleeping on this thing for a week.”

“But they haven’t…” He slips through her immediate memories to confirm that they’ve fed her regular meals and given her chances to bathe.

“Yes, but the helmet stays on whenever I leave this room,” Emma says with a sniff. “You should congratulate me on my hair, all things considered.”

He laughs lightly and sends her his compliments, marveling at how effortless it is to exist in this pure telepathic space—opening his mind wide open and walking through hers just as easily, in a looping exchange that feels like the most natural thing in the world.

_I couldn’t really imagine what it would be like to meet another telepath_, he projects. _But it’s—_

“Freeing,” she says softly.

He makes a small noise of agreement as he shuts his eyes. He’s nearly drifted off when Emma nudges lightly inside his mind.

_You don’t have a plan. _

He can’t deny it; she can see his total lack of a plan inside his head.

_What do they actually want? _he sends back. _What do they intend to do with us, aside from keep us here?_

He can all but feel her shaking her head. _Maybe they don’t actually know_. The tenor of her thoughts darken. _Maybe the whole point is to make sure we’re in here, cut off from the world._

_But that doesn’t make any— _He cuts off, frustrated. An entire roomful of CIA agents had been interested in telepathy, not to mention everything Hank relayed to them about the enormity of their research projects; it had to have been more than abstract interest.

Two branching paths emerge before him. He can continue the innocent act, diverting MacTaggert and anyone else who tries to question him, until eventually, hopefully, Erik and the others arrive to rescue them.

_What’s option two? _Emma projects.

Charles opens his eyes to find her looking back at him, her brows drawn.

“I tell them I’m a telepath,” he says, his voice echoing across the length of the cell.

*

If they _are _listening, the agents don’t rise to the bait immediately. Perhaps there’s nothing there, and he’s simply seen too many spy films—or perhaps MacTaggert is as good a strategist as Charles suspects she is.

He dozes and wakes in time for a bland but edible meal; maybe four or five hours later, they bring another one. A button by the door reliably summons their captors, though, unsurprisingly, they make him don the helmet before they’ll escort him to the utilitarian bathroom down the hall.

The bathroom experience itself is made both humiliating and significantly more difficult because they bind his hands behind his back whenever they take him out of the cell—presumably, they don’t trust him not to rip the damned thing off his head. To their credit, their instincts are completely correct.

They both eventually sleep for longer stretches, enough that he suspects at least a day has passed since he was taken, maybe two. The total lack of natural light quickly destabilizes any internal sense of time he was hanging onto; Emma says she’s long since given up thinking about it and that he should, too, but he finds it unsettling all the same.

They pass the time playing telepathic games, and trading stories by pushing scenes at each other in psychic bursts. He envies Emma’s adolescence, largely spent amongst children her own age, even if she used her powers to run circles around the other girls at Porter’s. It leaves him thinking about his own youth; if he’d been able to go away to school, he wonders, to leave Raven in the house and hope for the best, would they have a better relationship today?

“You’d never have done that, though,” Emma says. “Even if you left every miserable person in that house with an ironclad command to treat her well.” She pauses and raises an eyebrow. “_You_, honey—you clearly have control issues.”

Charles splutters at that. “Excuse me?”

Emma throws her head back as she laughs. “Go ahead, try and pull the denial card on a telepath.”

He huffs and lays down on his cot, staring resolutely at the ceiling and thinking about the past month with his sister. If he has abstract regrets about the trajectory of his entire relationship with Raven, he has more solid ones about everything that’s happened since he arrived in New York and tried to make amends.

“You haven’t been doing yourself any favors, that’s for sure,” Emma says wryly.

“Tremendously helpful, thank you.”

“For what it’s worth…” She trails off, and he rolls over on his side. She’s watching him with an appraising look on her face. “It seems like your sister and Erik are somewhat similar.”

“I suppose,” he says slowly. “They’re both passionate, and quick to anger. They both have a certain view of the world.”

Emma nods. “And yet, for all your bickering, you and Erik get along just fine.” He doesn’t miss the inflection in her tone, verbally or telepathically.

“Yes, well—”

“I know, I know, Erik is charmed by your particular…assets,” she says with a smirk. Charles coughs loudly and buries his face in the pillow. “But maybe some of the compromise you’ve found with him is about viewing him as an equal.”

He pushes himself up from the pillow. “Hang on—are you saying I don’t think highly enough of my sister?”

Emma scoffs. “I just heard you thinking of her as your _baby _sister!” She shakes her head. “She’s an adult woman now, whether you like it or not.”

A small, somewhat defensive part of him thinks about Raven’s impracticality and her impetuousness, and a reply along the lines of, “Well, then she should act like it”—which of course Emma picks up immediately. She rolls her eyes.

“I don’t care if she’s the most juvenile person in the world,” she says dismissively. “Look, sweetheart, I’d say we don’t have time to get into your inability to understand women when you can literally read our thoughts, but we both know time is the one thing we have in this hellhole.”

“Now wait a moment—”

She raises a hand to cut him off. “But for now, I’ll just say this: if I were you, I’d try a little harder to remember that you’re not her guardian anymore. She hasn’t needed a guardian in a long time. Unless you want to make her so angry she storms out again—maybe for good.”

He rolls back to face the ceiling again as he turns over Emma’s words. The sting of it is more precise, knowing she can see the full scope of his thoughts, and that she has access to the memories his brain can’t help but hold onto with extreme clarity.

“I understand what you’re saying,” he says slowly. “It’s only—”

There’s a bang, and then the sound of the buzzer that opens the interior door to their cell. He sits up quickly as Emma straightens on her own cot. One of the guards—the man Charles had initially identified as the second captor—strides in, wearing one of the helmets and looking more annoyed than anything else.

“Xavier,” he barks. “Let’s go.” He makes an impatient gesture towards the helmet sitting on the floor next to Charles’s cot. “And put that thing on.”

Charles stands slowly and reaches down for the helmet, projecting, _Any last requests? _at Emma.

_This is _your _grand plan, sugar_. She’s clearly trying to keep it casual, but he can feel the worry beneath the skepticism. He sends her a wave of reassurance, hoping it might bolster him in turn.

When he pulls on the helmet, everything goes dark again. It’s been strange enough, being cut off from the world after a lifetime of hundreds, sometimes thousands of minds in his periphery at a given moment, though Emma’s mind, in all its glorious expansiveness, has helped ease things significantly. But the helmet is, for lack of a better word, suffocating—as if someone’s shoved a cloth against his mouth and instructed him to breathe.

Emma is frowning at him, but he shakes his head and turns his back to the guard, holding out his wrists behind him without being asked. Once his hands are bound, he follows the guard out of the cell.

Revealing his telepathy might be a terrific misstep, but he can’t stomach the idea of simply waiting for rescue—not least when there’s so much information that they’re missing.

The guard deposits him in the same room he was taken to when he first arrived, shoving him roughly onto a folding chair and exiting without a word. A few minutes pass, then a few more, and what Charles wouldn’t give for a suspension of these tactics, tedious as they are.

Eventually the door opens and Agent MacTaggert enters, followed by Hank’s former boss, Agent Black. If Hank had been openly curious at the meeting in Virginia, Black’s mind had veered closer to astonished enthusiasm—had they met under different circumstances, Charles would have been eager to talk to him about his research in earnest, and the work the OSI were conducting at his facility.

Black looks apprehensive now, in stark contrast to MacTaggert, who’s all business as she walks into the room and nods at him.

“Dr. Xavier, you remember Agent Black?”

“Of course.” Charles says with a smile. “A pleasure.”

Black frowns slightly as he steps forward. “Yes, well, I’m…” He glances at MacTaggert before ducking his head as he takes a seat. “You must know I’m sorry we’re meeting again under these circumstances.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Charles says blithely. “It’s been lovely to get away for a few days.”

MacTaggert’s eyes narrow as she sits down beside Black. “We’re doing this again?”

Charles can’t help but laugh. “No, no,” he says. “No more equivocation—I thought I might try a different tack this time around.”

He pauses as the agents exchange a glance, and he lets a few moments pass to see if they’ll own up to eavesdropping. Black looks like he’s trying to send MacTaggert some sort of message with his eyes, but she shakes her head and turns to face Charles fully.

“Fine, we’re happy with the direct approach,” she says, her tone sharpening. “You _are _a telepath. To reiterate from our initial conversation when we brought you in, your ‘speculative’ work is, in fact, describing your own abilities, and the real abilities of others.”

Charles gives her a tight smile as he nods. MacTaggert glances at Black once more; if any information actually passes between them, he’d be hard-pressed to say so without his powers.

“Dr. Xavier, as you’ve clearly already guessed, we brought you here because we had strong evidence that you were a telepath, and we appreciate the explicit confirmation,” MacTaggert says. She spreads her hands flat on the table. “I’m sure you know about the nuclear situation, but in the spirit of full disclosure, things have escalated beyond what the public is aware of.”

Black nods vigorously. “We need your help,” he says quickly. “We’re facing a national security crisis of unprecedented—”

“If you know I’m a telepath,” Charles cuts in. “Then you know I overheard more than my share of this in Washington.” He pauses before he adds, “I’m also aware of the work within the agency on mind control.”

Now Black’s shared look with MacTaggert is quite clear: sharp and questioning. He turns back to Charles with a frown.

“Who did you—”

“But the thing I just can’t seem to wrap my mind around?” Charles says, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Why you thought drugging, kidnapping, and imprisoning us for days on end was a good way to ask for our help. I’m speaking on behalf of both myself and Miss Frost, by the way, if that wasn’t clear.”

Black looks stricken, but MacTaggert maintains her steely gaze. “Frankly,” she says. “You’re both too valuable and too…unpredictable to take any chances with.”

Charles leans back slightly. “Unpredictable?” he says, raising his eyebrows. “Are you questioning our loyalty to the United States, Agent MacTaggert?”

MacTaggert’s lips form a small moue of displeasure. “It brings me no joy to go down this path, to be clear,” she says. “But Emma Frost has spent the past several months inside the Soviet Union in the…intimate company of a Russian national. And you…”

It’s at that moment that Charles realizes: whatever they may have thought of him before, when the CIA came to take him, they found him in bed with Erik. They surely didn’t have _that_ information in advance, but it seems pretty damn likely they’ll use it against him now.

Black averts his gaze, and even MacTaggert looks slightly hesitant. Charles raises an eyebrow, all but daring her to continue.

“And you’ve been in the…intimate company of…” She trails off and gives him a sort of desperate look. He’s not about to make this any easier for her.

“Communists are homosexuals and vice versa, yes, yes, I fully understand,” he says briskly, smiling as he shakes his head. “My, this has been an enlightening chat, wouldn’t you agree?”

MacTaggert holds up a placating hand. “Dr. Xavier, I’m sorry about this, but—”

“You’ve established your position—quite clearly, I should add,” Charles says. “Why won’t you tell me what you actually _want_?”

MacTaggert presses her lips together, and Black clears his throat.

“Dr. Xavier,” Black says. “I have to be honest with you here. If it were up to me, we’d be working side by side with…with people who have…”

“Mutants,” Charles says firmly. “We don’t shy away from the word.” He shifts towards his professorial voice as he adds, “Mutation is the key to evolution, after all. Mutants—those with advanced mutations, like the people you’ve been tracking, or Miss Frost and myself—are poised to take humanity an enormous leap towards the future.”

It’s a scientific reality, but in this room, he can see the words the way Erik has always seen them—as a challenge to the people sitting across the table, and to the populace at large. The agents seem to take it that way, their expressions closing off slightly as MacTaggert leans forward.

“You can see, then, why the CIA considers you both an asset and a threat,” she says evenly.

Charles lets out a laugh. “So what’s the plan, exactly?” he says, struggling to sound anything other than incredulous. “We’ll feel so compelled by patriotic duty that we’ll happily peek inside the minds at the Kremlin for you? Send off a telepathic order for their scientists to deescalate?”

“So you _can _compel people to do things?” Black says, looking eager in spite of himself.

Part of him wants to taunt them, to tell them to pluck the helmet off and see for themselves, but Charles closes his mouth instead—he cannot let them provoke him into giving away the full extent of his powers. It’s so much harder to maintain his regular sense of controlled balance without his telepathy; learning just how much he relies on it has been one of the most frightening parts of this entire ordeal.

“So,” he says, sliding past Black’s question entirely. “What happens if we continue to refuse to comply? We remain prisoners of the U.S. government indefinitely?”

MacTaggert, as skilled at maintaining neutrality as she is, can’t smooth over the look of disappointment fast enough. “You aren’t a prisoner, Dr. Xavier—”

“Funny,” he says, twisting slightly to give them a view of his bound hands. “Between this and the cell and the jumpsuit, I could have sworn—”

“You are a person of interest,” she says, raising her voice slightly to talk over him. “To both the teams working on MKULTRA as well as my colleagues who’ve been studying pow—_mutants _this past year. We—”

“Pardon me, but surely there’s no ‘we’ here, Agent MacTaggert,” he interrupts. “You didn’t know about any of this a week ago.”

She looks startled. “How did you…?”

“Three guesses,” Charles says with a small smile.

She glances at Black. “Well, I’ve now been fully briefed, and I—”

“I assume that if you’d been brought in on the mutant question from the start,” Charles says carefully. “Detaining us wouldn’t have been your desired outcome.”

“I…” She takes a breath before she shakes her head. “No, I’m sorry, you don’t get to pit me against my superiors.”

“That wasn’t my intent,” he says, softening his tone slightly. It’s an outright lie, but needs must. He gives her a sympathetic smile and shakes his head as he says, “I just don’t envy the position they’ve put you in.”

MacTaggert is watching him with the same shrewd expression she first wore in his study. “I’m not sure what you’re playing at, Dr. Xavier, but—”

“No games,” he says quickly. “No equivocation, remember?”

She still looks skeptical and silence stretches between them. Charles leans back and rearranges the pieces of the conversation in his mind, trying to slot them together differently. It seems fairly certain that they won’t be able to remove the twin clouds of suspicion that sit over his head and Emma’s, and he has no sense of when—or, loath as he is to consider it, if—Erik and the others will be able to get them out of here.

But MKULTRA surely must be the mind-control program, with a name as ludicrous as that—and if they’re trapped here, he can make the most of his time by figuring out what on earth these people are thinking.

Black is looking back and forth between the two of them, all but broadcasting his conflicting emotions. MacTaggert isn’t a lost cause, but Charles is certain that Black is going to be the easier one to pump information from—the man is so obviously like Hank, pure inquisitiveness outweighing any sense of political self-preservation.

“Let’s start over,” Charles says, keeping his tone light. “I’m happy to confirm some basic facts about telepathy, though I’d like to understand how your colleagues expect us to be of any real use in the face of an impending nuclear war.”

MacTaggert squints, the skepticism still radiating off her even without telepathic insight, but Black all but lights up, nodding enthusiastically.

“I’m not sure—” MacTaggert begins.

“Absolutely,” Black says at the same time.

They look at each other and MacTaggert frowns at him, but when he turns back to Charles he says eagerly, “What do you need to know?”

Charles smiles.


	12. Chapter 12

Erik is on the northern edge of the estate when the first hint of dawn breaks on the horizon. He’s cold and exhausted, and he’s known for more than an hour that his continuing search is just an attempt to assuage his guilt—whoever took Charles is long since gone, and they’ve left no trace beyond the strangely alloyed canister on the floor of their bedroom and a set of tire tracks in the drive.

He scrubs his face with his hands as the guilt presses on him, like someone’s caught his chest in a vice and is squeezing slowly, inch by inch. It’s accompanied by a thrumming undercurrent of fear he can’t drown out with rational strategizing. He’d prided himself on levelheadedness under pressure for a decade and a half, but now somehow, he’s fourteen again, internally panicking as a gun is pointed at his mother’s head.

He can feel a figure approaching, a belt buckle and a few fillings and a thin necklace, warmed slightly from being worn beneath a shirt, and then he can see a silhouette in the early morning light. Erik lowers his hands and lets his shoulders droop.

“Hey, man.” Darwin stops half a dozen feet away, and Erik can just make out his soft expression of concern. “I don’t think there’s much more you can do out here, and the ladies and I are finished searching the house.” He doesn’t say whether they found anything; he doesn’t need to.

“And Hank?” Erik asks.

“Not done yet,” Darwin says, shaking his head. “But come inside. I’ll make some coffee.”

It’s a good ten minutes back to the house, and he walks beside Darwin in silence. The sky’s growing lighter by the minute as the birdsong gets louder and louder—in spite of everything, it has the makings of a beautiful spring morning.

Darwin leaves him in the front parlor, the largest on the ground floor and their designated spot to reconvene, before heading off towards the kitchen. Mystique and Angel are on the brocade sofa by the fireplace, sitting closer than Erik has ever seen them sit before—Mystique, in her natural form, has her head on Angel’s shoulder, eyes squeezed shut, and Angel is stroking her short red strands.

When Mystique opens her eyes, it’s clear that she’s been crying. “I’m assuming you didn’t find anything,” she says without lifting her head from Angel’s shoulder.

Erik frowns and says nothing as he shakes his head. He rests a hand against the back of an armchair and leans his weight on it; he’s not certain he can bear to sit right now.

“What’s next?” Angel says.

Erik doesn’t meet their eyes as he says, “Let’s see what Hank discovers.”

He’s stalling, and he’s sure the women know it, too. But Hank is a better asset than the rest of them combined: if the CIA is responsible, he’s their only hope of figuring out where Charles has been taken, and how to get him out.

And once Charles has been safely removed from wherever he’s being held, Erik has a pretty firm idea of how to handle the people who kidnapped him.

Darwin enters the room, his hands enlarged and reshaped to safely carry four steaming mugs without spilling them. Mystique stands and takes two of them, and Erik thanks him as he accepts his own. They drink their coffee in silence for a few minutes, until Hank enters the room, looking worn and a little apprehensive.

“Well?” Erik snaps at him.

Darwin gives him a quelling look. It has a different effect from Charles’s visual and telepathic pleas to be nicer to Hank—his disappointment tends to play up the guilt factor, in true Charles fashion—but it chastens him all the same.

Hank crosses to sit in one of the chairs, where he takes off his glasses and massages the bridge of his nose. “The canister is now in a sealed container,” he informs them. “And I can say with near-certainty that our suspicions were correct.”

“The CIA?” Angel asks.

“Yes,” Hank says, nodding and putting his glasses back on. “I still don’t know what the canister is made of, but it’s definitely one of ours. I opened it up and ran some tests on the residuals.” He pauses and looks thoughtful for a moment. “I recognize the active compound, but frankly, I’m shocked they got it to work so effectively.”

“Effectively here means…?” Darwin gives him a gentle gesture to elaborate.

“For all intents and purposes, it’s knockout gas,” Hank says. They must look skeptical, because he adds, “I know, it sounds like something from a comic book—but it’s been a research priority for years. You can imagine why they were interested in developing something like this.”

“To kidnap people with comic-book powers while they’re sleeping,” Erik says sarcastically.

Hank seems to miss his tone entirely. “You must have been completely incapacitated by it, if you could still smell it when you woke up. And Dr. Xavier as well, of course, when they…” He trails off, frowning.

“Right,” Mystique says, putting her mug down on the side table with a little too much force and turning to face Erik directly. “Is now a good time to talk about how you and Charles were sleeping in the same bed?”

Erik glares back at her. “No.”

“Really?” she says, raising her chin slightly. “Because it seems to me—”

“Really,” Erik repeats flatly.

Mystique scoffs and waves her hand in a broad gesture. “You don’t think this little detail might be relevant to the rest of us?”

He glances at the other members of the group. Hank is looking down at the ornate carpet, clearly extremely uncomfortable, while Darwin’s expression is placidly neutral, as always. Angel is watching him with an echo of her cautious encouragement from their conversation out on the lawn—somehow a little over twelve hours ago, though it feels like days.

Erik doesn’t say anything in response, but unsurprisingly, Mystique isn’t willing to let it go. “How long have you two been sleeping together?” she demands.

He sighs. “There are far more pressing things to—”

“It was from the start, wasn’t it?” she interrupts. “That first day, when we went to his hotel room and you stayed behind when I left. I _knew_ there was a reason you fell in step with him so—”

“_Mystique_,” Erik says sharply. “This isn’t the time. Charles and I will discuss this with you once we get him back safely.”

“Oh my God,” Mystique says, her mouth falling open. “Are you two actually _together?_”

“Babe.” Angel places a hand on Mystique’s shoulder. “He’s right. We should talk about this later.”

Mystique pulls back and twists to face Angel, pointing at her as she says, “You don’t seem surprised—did you know about this?”

“Yeah, I did,” Angel says coolly. She catches Mystique’s finger and gently presses her hand back against her breastbone. “And they know about us, too.”

Mystique shakes Angel off and turns back to face Erik, her face flushed closer to purple than blue. “Was Charles spying—”

“Enough,” Erik snaps. “Yes, Charles and I are…together. No, Charles has not read your mind, as far as I’m aware, but he has read Angel’s—and it’s not my place to apologize for that. None of this is relevant to the crisis at hand, though when we get Charles back I look forward to giving up the pretense that we sleep in separate bedrooms. Does that satisfy your curiosity?”

He lets the final question hang in the air, glaring at each of them in turn, his gaze resting finally on Mystique. She still looks furious, but she says nothing further, her lips pressed in a firm line. Despite everything, he can’t help but marvel at her mercurial attitude towards her brother, seeing as she was weeping over his capture only minutes ago—but then, to put it charitably, Charles often manages to provoke several disparate emotions simultaneously.

“Fantastic,” he says dryly. “Now on to topics that actually matter. Hank—” He realizes how harsh his tone is as Hank leans back slightly, looking even more frightened of him than he normally does. He takes a deep breath and works to keep his frustration with the boy off his face. “Hank,” he repeats, calmer this time. “If the CIA has Charles, where would they be keeping him?”

“I…” Hank frowns. “I can think of a few places.”

“‘A few’ isn’t good enough,” Erik says, his tone sharpening again involuntarily. “We don’t have an infinite amount of time.”

Darwin shakes his head. “I’d say ‘a few’ is a good place to start,” he says firmly.

“Fine,” Erik says with a sigh. “Come on. There’s a collection of maps in Charles’s study.”

They lay out maps on every flat surface in the room, mostly of the northeast and the Eastern Seaboard, though Erik has a quiet moment of dread at the idea that they’ve put Charles on an airplane and he’s now thousands of miles away. Hank sits down at Charles’s desk and begins filling up a sheet of paper with his neat, cramped handwriting.

“There are three potential sites that make sense to me,” he says after a few minutes, standing and passing the paper to Darwin. “West Virginia is the only one built within the past year. I’d heard it was a medical facility, but in light of all of this, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was specifically meant for mutants.”

Erik cranes his neck to read over Darwin’s shoulder. Hank has made a bulleted list, the three states printed in large block letters, circled twice, followed by geographical details and miscellaneous notes. Darwin moves the largest map to Charles’s desk and puts a loose box around each of the locations in heavy pencil.

“These are the places where the CIA keeps their prisoners, then?” Erik says, frowning as he looks at the map and estimates distances. Ohio, West Virginia, and New Hampshire; the last is the closest, and even that will probably be at least a five-hour drive, by his quick calculations. The West Virginia site, deep in the Appalachians, will probably be a full day’s journey.

“These are just…” Hank cuts off, giving him a frustrated look. “Look, Mr. Lehnsherr, it’s not like I approve of—”

“I know, I know,” Erik says, waving him off. “You’re with us now.”

Hank opens his mouth like he’s about to say more, but then shuts it again.

“It’s good to have a rough idea of location, but we’re talking about the CIA here,” Darwin says, raising his eyebrows. “You think that you’d actually be able to find these spots?”

Mystique snorts. “Probably won’t have big roadside signs that say ‘CIA DETENTION SITE HERE’ in neon letters, will they?”

Hank shrugs and pushes his glasses up his nose. “I think I’ll be able to give good enough directions to get us in range, and hopefully we can use powers like Mr. Lehnsherr’s to do the rest. These sites will all have large amounts of metal amongst mostly trees.” He pauses and his cheeks turn slightly red as he adds, “Also I do, uh…I have a really good memory.” 

“OK, but what _about_ Erik’s powers?” Mystique says with a frown. “There are three sites but there are only five of us. It’ll take us a whole week to travel to all the locations.”

“Ten of us,” Angel says, her eyes widening. “At least. We have everyone down in the city, and they might even be able to bring in a few more—I know Toad has contact information for half a dozen mutants who didn’t want to join the house but were friendly enough when we met them.”

“Excellent,” Erik says, feeling more and more secure as the pieces begin to slot into place. The idea of actually _doing_ something to help Charles is becoming more tangible by the minute. He nods at Angel and says, “You’ll call to debrief them when we finalize our plans?”

“Of course, boss,” Angel says. She gives him a small smile, and he inclines his head in return.

“This team will stay together, and we’ll go to West Virginia if Hank deems that our best bet,” Erik says, looking at each of them one by one. “We’ve already been working and training together this past month, and I want our two most valuable assets with me specifically.”

“Me,” Mystique says, putting her hands on her hips. From her tone, it seems to be more a statement of fact than anything else.

“Yes,” he confirms. “Practice your best impersonation of a grey-faced government agent.”

Mystique lets out a laugh at that, shaking her head. “And the other?”

Erik glances at Hank, and they all follow his gaze. Hank looks like he wishes the floor would open up and swallow him whole.

“I don’t think that my mutation will be particularly useful in—”

“Not your mutation,” Erik says. “Beyond your knowledge of these facilities, we need your physical presence. We brought you up here with the things you had on you the day we met—including your lab coat and badge.”

“But…” Hank looks down at the floor, his brows drawn. “If they see me there, if they recognize me…that will mean the end of my career.”

“Your career with the CIA,” Erik says flatly. He tries to tamp down a surge of anger, tinged with disbelief, as Hank looks back up at him. “The organization that is actively hunting down and kidnapping mutants.”

“I know that!” Hank says, his voice rising slightly. “But I’m just not…”

Darwin can clearly see that Erik is about to start yelling, because he puts a hand on his shoulder and angles his body so it acts as a sort of barrier between him and Hank.

“It’s scary,” Darwin says softly, looking directly at Hank. “I mean, this whole thing is scary. A month ago I thought I was the only one with these strange powers, and then I learn that there are a whole lot of us, and now the government’s after us, too?” He lets out a little laugh and rubs the back of his neck. “It’s a lot to wrap your head around. But we all need to protect each other—and you’re one of the best hopes we have.”

Hank frowns. “I don’t…”

“You are,” Erik confirms. He’s not thrilled that they have to essentially coddle the boy, but they can’t do this without him. He tries to think of what Charles would say at this exact moment, and then he rolls his eyes and adds, “You know that Charles can’t shut up about how brilliant you are. Even if they don’t recognize you at the facility, he’s not going to let you go back to them.”

Hank visibly brightens at this, even standing up a little straighter and taller, and Erik feels like a fool—they likely could have bypassed the entire argument if he’d simply said, “Charles wants you to rescue him personally.”

“We’re good, then?” Darwin asks with a smile.

Hank bites his lip and then he nods. “We’ll need to get a few things,” he says, already sounding more sure of himself. “We can’t just walk up to the site armed only with our mutations and my employee badge.”

*

They’re ready to leave by mid-afternoon, once Darwin and Mystique track down a white van that Hank thinks will look innocuous enough driving into the facility. Hank spends a few hours making modifications—most importantly, building a space for most of the group to hide when they go through the security checkpoint.

Erik spends the morning trying to calm his nerves, mostly by throwing his knife out on the lawn. He focuses on both distance and accuracy, managing to stop it a fraction of an inch from a large tree about a hundred yards from where he stands; he’s grateful to have control over one thing, at least.

Just before they leave, Angel reports that the Gramercy house is fully onboard: they’ll split into two teams once they call in a few more mutants, with Toad leading the Ohio group and Randall taking New Hampshire. Lorelei has offered to stay behind, and all three groups will check in with her eventually. 

Erik drives, after making it clear that it wasn’t up for debate. The mood in the van is tense and quiet, though it shifts to communal annoyance as they crawl through traffic in New Jersey. They stop at a motel on the southern Pennsylvania border by nightfall. He pays for three rooms, and Darwin quickly offers to share with Hank, leaving Erik on his own.

He has a hard time falling asleep that night, even though he knows Charles will need him as alert as possible tomorrow. The bed isn’t particularly large—not compared to the one they share at the house, at least, which is almost comically wide and seems even more absurd when Erik imagines Charles sleeping in it as a small boy. But it feels incredibly empty all the same, as he rests a hand flat against the space beside him on the mattress and slowly runs his powers over the metal in the darkened room.

Erik has long considered his tendency to plan for all contingencies to be one of his greatest strengths, but as he thinks about what lies ahead of them and shuffles the variables around in his mind—Charles at a different site, Charles at none of them, what would happen if Erik is incapacitated, or if the entire team is taken down—he can feel that press of fear again, each possibility a heavier weight than the next.

He knows that he’s emotionally compromised right now, dangerously so, though it feels different from his undeniably emotion-driven quest to kill Schmidt in a way he can’t quite articulate. He thinks about Angel’s description out on the lawn, that he’d destroy the world for Charles. He can see the truth in her words—and the threatening promise of it.

The following afternoon, they’ve been climbing up into the mountains for some time when Hank clears his throat and says, “Actually, I think we might be…”

Erik catches his gaze in the rearview mirror and raises his eyebrows. “Do you want me to pull over?”

Hank looks frustratingly indecisive for a moment, glancing back at the detailed topographical map he’s been studying, but when he looks up again he nods. “How big is your range, if you had to estimate?”

Erik truly has no idea, so he pulls off the road and puts the van in park. “Let’s find out.”

They spend the better part of the next two hours stopping every ten miles or so, and each time, Erik stretches out his powers as far as they’ll extend. When he finally senses what must be the facility, he sucks in an involuntary breath, and he can feel the rest of the group lean towards him in anticipation.

“It’s maybe a mile away,” he says as he feels the hands on his watch. It’s just after four in the afternoon. “And it looks like we have less than an hour to spare.”

Hank has recommended they drive in not under cover of darkness, but at the next shift change. He insists that regardless of what the agents and scientists are doing at any given moment, which tends to be unpredictable, security turns over like clockwork three times a day.

“Well, Mystique, let’s see it,” Darwin says, turning to face the back seat and giving her a smile. Erik twists around to watch her.

Mystique affects a look of deep concentration, scrunching up her blue nose, and then her body shifts, lengthening and broadening, taking on a pale complexion and a thick head of dark, unruly hair, until she _almost_ looks like Hank’s boss. She’s been developing the persona over the past day, based purely on Hank’s descriptions, and this version is as close as she’s gotten so far, but it’s still not quite right—she looks more like Agent Black’s relative than his twin.

“It’s…” Hank looks like he’s trying to find a polite way to say it needs work. “It’s just that…”

“It needs work,” Erik cuts in. He stretches over the back of his seat to clap her on her suit-clad shoulder. “You’re nearly there, though.”

He leaves Hank to give Mystique more concrete pointers, opening the driver’s side door and stepping out onto the poorly paved road. They haven’t seen another car pass in at least half an hour. Erik isn’t particularly comfortable waiting here—there’s no cover, and he feels more than a little like a sitting duck—but driving up and down this road for an hour seems like the more conspicuous option of the two.

A mile away, though—Charles might be just a quick walk through these woods. If he _is_ at this site, they’ve likely been well within his natural range for hours, but deliberately reaching out still seems worth a shot. He closes his eyes and thinks as hard as he can about Charles.

_Can you hear me? _he projects. A few moments pass, but he’s met with only silence—there’s nothing in his head but his own thoughts. He squeezes his eyes shut tighter. _Charles, I—_

He cuts off with a noise of frustration, just catching himself before he takes it out on the van. There are a thousand reasons why Charles might not respond: he could be asleep, or doing something that requires deep concentration, or actively shielding his mind to ward off intrusions.

“Hey.” Angel comes around the side of the van to stand beside him. “Are you OK?”

Erik turns away, gazing at the place where the road curves out of sight. “I’m fine,” he says. “Just ready to get moving.”

“Yeah, so…you probably wouldn’t be shocked to hear that I’m not the world’s most optimistic person,” Angel says with a sardonic laugh. Erik turns back to face her, and she’s leaning against the van and giving him a small smile. “But I’m choosing to believe that Charles is just through those trees, and that there’s some simple reason why he hasn’t just knocked those assholes out with his mind.”

“Such as…?” Erik trails off. He’s at a loss; despite his penchant for shifting through possibilities, this is the one question that, for obvious reasons, he’s been wholesale avoiding.

“Look, I don’t know, man,” Angel says with a shrug. “I’m just choosing to believe it, all right?”

Erik watches her for a moment, trying to match the steadiness of her gaze, before he repeats, “All right.”

Angel crosses to lean on the hood of the van, and Erik joins her. She nudges her shoulder against his. They sit in silence for a while, until Mystique comes out and stands in front of them. She’s now the spitting image of Agent Black, at least in Erik’s slightly fuzzy memory of the man, and she poses and puts her hands on her hips. Angel shakes her head as she laughs, leaning over to give Mystique a shove.

“Very impressive,” Erik tells her. She gives him a dramatic bow, which looks incongruously graceful on Black’s body.

“Fellas, I think it’s time,” Darwin calls out. Erik checks the hands of his watch to confirm and nods.

“Good,” he says, walking back around to stand in front of the open driver’s side door. “Do we need to go over the plan once more?”

“For the hundred-and-first time? I think we’ve got it,” Mystique says with only a whiff of sarcasm. She doesn’t necessarily _sound_ like Black—it’s more a generic male voice than anything else—but then, that would probably be significantly more difficult for Hank to describe.

Erik gives her a flat look. “Fine,” he says. “Let’s go.”

Mystique climbs into the passenger seat, and Darwin and Angel head with Erik to the back of the van. They’re cloaked by a simple false wall that Hank constructed—if anyone opens the back doors, a possibility on which Hank placed 50/50 odds, they’ll see a bit of an optical illusion, the impression of an area that’s slightly less deep than it truly is.

Hank is an extremely cautious driver, so it feels like an eternity before they’re turning onto gravel. Erik’s sense of the facility—which thankfully seems to be made of far more steel than the average building—grows stronger by the second. He can pick out individual doors, and the beams of the foundation. It’s new and well-built, but it wouldn’t be hard to take this thing down.

They finally pull to a stop, and Erik holds his breath as they wait for Hank to show his credentials. A good half a minute passes, and then the van is moving again.

“Thank fuck for that,” Angel mutters under her breath. Erik can’t help but concur, though he needs to ensure they don’t grow complacent just because things have gone smoothly thus far.

The van passes from gravel onto something more solid and comes to a stop. He makes eye contact with the other two; Angel gently punches his arm and Darwin gives him an encouraging smile.

“Happy to run backup on this,” Darwin says. “But don’t hesitate—” He pats the chain he’s still wearing under his shirt, obviously knowing Erik can sense the motion. “Give this a tug if you need us?”

“Seriously,” Angel says softly, one corner of her mouth turning upwards. “Don’t forget that we’ve all got your back.”

Erik doesn’t say anything in response, but he gives them a firm nod that he hopes expresses his gratitude. He slips around the edge of the false wall and opens the back of the van with his powers.

His first goal is to find and take down someone who can provide him with a disguise. He walks a few feet behind Hank and Mystique-as-Agent-Black as they cross out of what appears to be a loading dock and into a dull, cinderblock-walled corridor.

He can feel bits of metal moving around in the various rooms—clipboards, wire-rimmed glasses, pens, and, in one room, a large amount of surgical equipment that leaves him immediately tense as he brushes over it with his powers. Some rooms are similar, but some have strange things that mark them out—one has almost no metal at all, while another one seems to have a thin layer of metal covering every wall. In a big room where at least half a dozen people appear to be gathered, there’s an enormous collection of circuitry that could only be a very large computer.

In a small room towards the end of the hallway, a man with a gun at his belt is pacing in a tight circle. On his head, he’s wearing something that feels like it’s made of the same strange alloy as the canister the CIA left behind. Luckily, he’s alone.

Erik stretches out his fine control and takes hold of the gun, whipping it up and thrusting the butt of it square against the space just below the helmet with quick, blunt force. He can feel the man crumple as the rest of the metal on his body falls to the floor.

“Come on,” he hisses, pushing past Hank and Mystique and gesturing roughly for them to follow. He uses his powers to unlock the door and once they’re inside, he locks it again behind them.

“You did that without looking?” Hank asks, staring at the man’s prone form in disbelief.

Erik ignores him, pulling the helmet from the man’s head and placing it on the table in the center of the room. They appear to be of similar height, though the man looks to be significantly heavier than he is; he’ll have to make it work as best he can. He quickly removes the man’s shoes, followed by his uniform, which he lays beside the helmet. The man is down to his underthings, and Erik jerks his head at Hank.

“Can you arrange him so I can bind his hands and feet?”

Hank still looks gobsmacked, and he blinks at Erik for a moment before he seems to come to his senses and rush forward. Erik stands, and he’s about to strip down when he notices Mystique watching him with an appraising look.

“Really, Mystique?” he says, putting his hands on his hips.

“Look, can you blame a girl for being curious?” she says, her tone edging up against coy.

It’s almost comical coming out of Black’s mouth, but Erik just shakes his head and gestures for her to turn. She sighs dramatically as she faces the opposite wall.

The uniform is too large, but there isn’t much he can do about that. Thankfully, his own shoes don’t look significantly different, so he puts them back on. He picks up the helmet and studies it for a moment, cocking his head.

“Is this a standard thing you people wear?”

Hank straightens and joins him, frowning as he runs a hand across the helmet’s surface. “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he says slowly. “It looks almost like…”

“It’s the same material as the canister,” Erik confirms. “I can feel it.”

“Are you going to put it on?” Mystique says.

“I suppose I should?” Erik shrugs as he pulls it on. It’s not heavy, but it completely destroys his peripheral vision. “Why on earth would anyone wear this?”

Erik uses his powers to pull apart one of the table’s folding chairs and then twists two of the legs into unbroken bindings around the man’s wrists and ankles.

“How are they supposed to get that off?” Hank asks with a frown.

Mystique snorts and slaps him on the back. “That is _not_ our problem, buddy.”

Erik floats the man’s gun into his hand and holsters it at his waist before stretching out his powers to encompass a full radius around the room. “The coast is clear,” he tells them.

Mystique leads, and between her confident stride and the way Hank is eagerly trailing behind her, she’s convincingly pulling off the role of Hank’s boss. Erik tries to affect the sort of careless arrogance of a man who works for the American government, keeping a hand lightly resting on the gun as he walks a few feet behind the pair of them.

They turn the corner and a door opens towards the end of the hallway. “Act natural,” Erik hisses.

Hank immediately stiffens and starts to walk in a way that Erik could only describe as “deeply unnatural”; he rolls his eyes and tugs lightly on Hank’s wristwatch as a warning. This shouldn’t be as hard as Hank is making it out to be, since he’s the only one who actually has the credentials to be here.

And then two figures step out of the room, and Mystique says aloud, “Fuck.”

Agents Black and MacTaggert look up in surprise. MacTaggert is quicker to react, turning to head back into the room and presumably sound some sort of alarm, but Erik pulls her back by her watch as he grabs Black’s as well.

Mystique looks back at him with wide eyes. “What do we do?”

“In the room,” Erik barks out, all but thrusting the two agents through the doorway by tugging on their wrists. The three of them follow, and Erik slams the door and fuses the lock shut.

He holds them still by every bit of metal on their bodies and quickly disassembles another folding chair, apparently the only furniture they have in this place. He bends a leg around each of their arms and torsos and another around their knees, effectively immobilizing them.

MacTaggert is glaring at him, but Black is staring with open wonder at his doppelgänger.

“Remarkable,” he breathes. He suddenly seems to realize Hank is standing beside his twin, and his eyebrows shoot towards his hairline. “Hank! What on earth are you doing here?”

Hank is looking back and forth between the two Agent Blacks with a deeply confused expression on his face.

Erik doesn’t have time for games. “Where’s Charles?”

MacTaggert rolls her eyes. “Do you know how many government agents are in this facility? You think you can—”

“I don’t care who else is in this facility,” Erik says, lowering his voice and stepping closer to them. “I think you both value your lives more than your jobs—and, for that matter, more than your _loyalty_ to your government.” He holds his hand palm-up, an unnecessary gesture but an effective one all the same, and squeezes his fingers into a fist as he slowly tightens the bands across their torsos.

MacTaggert shakes her head even as she coughs at the increased pressure. “We won’t—”

“Stop!” Black cuts in. “I’ll tell you.”

MacTaggert whips her head to face him. “Don’t you dare—”

“You can sense metal, yes?” Black says, simultaneously managing to look fearful and fascinated as he glances down at the metal bands. “Feel for the room that’s lined with it—all four walls, floor, and ceiling.”

MacTaggert looks like she would squeeze Black to death herself if she could get her arms free. Erik just nods, loosening the bands slightly and turning to Mystique and Hank. “Stay here with them.”

Mystique shakes her head. “But I want to—”

“We don’t have time for arguments,” he says, turning and reforming the lock on the door.

He stretches out his powers and then he senses it: the room with the thin metal lining he catalogued earlier. It’s only around the next corner, a small room with an antechamber, and he’s not sure how he didn’t notice before—it’s the same strange alloy that’s been plaguing them this whole time.

Two scientists in white coats are walking out in the hall, deep in conversation; Erik debates playing it cool and letting them pass, and then thinks better of it, knocking them out, one after another, with the clipboard that one of them had been holding. He turns the corner and sees a man wearing a uniform that matches his own, though without the helmet, exiting a room and shutting the door behind him; Erik pulls the same trick he used on the first guard, and the man drops heavily to the floor.

He stops in front of what he suspects is the correct door and takes a deep breath before blasting through the outer lock. In the dimly lit antechamber, he repeats the motion. The door swings open and he steps inside.

“Oh Erik, thank _God_—” Charles all but rushes him, pulling him into a bruisingly tight hug. Erik stands stunned for a moment before he realizes that Charles is here, looking utterly worn down in a prison jumpsuit but warm and solid and alive, and Erik grips him back just as tightly.

“Charles, I—”

Charles pulls back and looks up at Erik’s head, his eyes wide. “Why are you wearing—take that damn thing off!”

He reaches up and yanks the helmet off so quickly that it hurts, but Erik is instantly distracted by the flood of Charles’s telepathy sweeping through his head, so strong that he stumbles slightly. Charles laughs as he grabs his biceps to pull him upright.

He opens his mouth and struggles for the right words to say, but he’s so overwhelmed by the combination of Charles’s emotions and his own that he shuts it, pulling Charles closer again and tilting his chin up—

Someone clears their throat, loudly, and Charles steps backwards quickly, his cheeks a bright pink. Erik looks over at the source of the sound. Emma Frost is sitting on a cot wearing the same grey jumpsuit as Charles, and she’s shaking her head as she gives him a wry smile.

“Save it for when I’m not in the room, sugar,” she says.

Erik’s mouth falls open. “What are you doing here?”

Emma stands and crosses the length of the cell, and Erik turns to embrace her. She gives him a telepathic greeting of her own, a mix of affection and amusement and something so familiar that he’s suddenly overwhelmed by how much he’s missed her these past few months.

“I’m touched, I really am,” she says as she pulls back. “Makes me feel like less of a third wheel in this little reunion.”

Charles laughs, and he reaches out to catch Erik’s hand. Erik looks down quickly and then over at Emma to gauge her reaction, but she just snorts.

“Trust me, when I say I’ve seen _everything_ you’ve been up to recently…”

His cheeks heat up at that, and he opens his mouth to respond when he feels a jolt of Charles’s excitement echoing through his skull.

“Hang on, I was distracted by your arrival, but—” Charles’s eyes are very bright. “The door is open.”

“Yes,” Erik says. “We should actually resume this later, because—”

Charles pushes past him, crossing the threshold of the antechamber. “Come on!”

In the hallway, aside from the people Erik knocked unconscious, everyone else is standing stock-still, including a group of men in suits who were clearly heading for Charles and Emma’s cell, guns outstretched. Erik melts all of them and they clunk to the floor, one by one.

Erik turns to Charles. “Are you holding every—”

“Yes,” he interrupts with a brisk nod. “Emma, can you sense them?”

There’s a crack in her habitually cool facade as her eyes widen, and she looks like she’s about to cry. “Yes, thank God,” she says in a rush. She presses the heels of her palms against her eyes, and when she lowers her hands, she shakes her head as if she’s resetting her composure. “I’ll go and get them.”

She sprints off down the hallway and turns the corner. Erik gives Charles a questioning look.

“Azazel and Janos are here,” Charles says, adding with a smile, “_Alive_. Heavily sedated, but…”

“That’s great news,” Erik says. “Not that I’m not relieved, but Azazel can also get us out of here much faster than the van we came in.”

“Yes, but—” The smile slips from Charles’s face, and he sets his mouth in a small, determined line. “Not quite yet.”

He turns in the opposite direction from Emma, back towards the room where Erik left Hank, Mystique, and the CIA agents. Erik follows him, floating a mental question in his direction.

“I need to—” When Charles looks over at him, his expression is difficult to read. “We can’t just leave, not when they know the things that they know. But I’m not exactly certain…”

As they turn the corner, Erik feels it before he sees it—amongst dozens of frozen bodies, someone is moving, a helmet on his head and a gun held firmly between both hands. Then, a split second later, he feels the pull of a trigger and a bullet fired. He acts on pure instinct, shoving Charles out of the way so roughly that he stumbles to the floor.

He halts the bullet a foot before it reaches him, and then whips it back at their assailant. It hits the man square in the chest, and he drops like a stone.

“Charles,” he says urgently, panic spiking as he kneels down beside him. “Did I hurt you?”

Charles sits up and gingerly rubs his elbow. “Just a little, nothing more than a bruise or two, surely—” His expression softens as he catches Erik’s gaze, and he reaches up to rest a hand against his cheek. “I’m fine, darling, don’t worry. You probably saved my life.”

Erik can’t help but imagine what would have happened if he’d sensed the bullet a second later, and a tremor rolls through him at the thought. Charles sends him a wave of reassurance as he presses his other hand against the opposite cheek, and then he pulls him closer, until their lips brush. Erik leans forward to kiss him properly, and Charles’s mind flares wide open in response, enveloping his entirely.

Erik is close to losing all sense of propriety in the hallway of a CIA detention site, but after a minute, Charles pulls back, giving him a small final kiss. The corners of his mouth quirk upwards in a sly smile. “Nothing too heated right now,” he says teasingly, his fingers still pressing against Erik’s cheek. “I can’t have you breaking my concentration when I’m holding so many minds…”

He moves to stand, but Erik is quicker to his feet, reaching down to help him up. Charles straightens and keeps gripping Erik’s hand as he looks over at the figure on the floor. The man is obviously dead.

“Oh,” he says quietly.

“He tried to kill you,” Erik says. He won’t apologize for self-defense, particularly not when it comes to the people who’ve been holding Charles hostage.

Charles frowns, still looking down at the man. “I know, but…”

“Hang on,” Erik says, taking a step closer. “How did he get past your—”

“The helmet,” Charles says. “It blocks telepathy. It’s the same material they lined that room with—every time they’ve taken us out here, we’ve had to wear one of them ourselves.”

Erik tries to imagine what it would feel like if someone placed a helmet on his head that cut off access to his powers. It’s a horrific thought. Charles squeezes his hand and sends him a little telepathic pulse.

“Yes, it was vile,” he says, shaking his head like he’s trying to brush off the memory of wearing it. “But this is a good reminder that we don’t know how many of these they have.” He stares down at the body again, his gaze growing distant. “I suppose I didn’t feel him die because…”

Erik looks at him sharply, finishing his sentence in slow realization. “…if he hadn’t been wearing the helmet you would have felt that?”

Charles looks up at him with an expression that’s too complicated to untangle before he tugs Erik forward, giving the body an exaggeratedly wide berth as they pass it. They reach the room where he left the others and Charles gestures for Erik to open the door.

“Charles!”

Mystique nearly tackles her brother as she runs over to hug him. She’s back in her natural form, completely naked, and she lifts Charles slightly off the ground as she grabs him. He laughs as he squeezes her in return.

She pulls back and holds him at arm’s length, looking him up and down and prodding various parts like she’s checking for injuries. “Are you—”

“I’m fine, love,” he says softly. “No permanent damage.” He steps back and looks over at Hank, who’s watching them shyly. Charles beams at him. “Hank, you’ve done incredible work the past few days, truly. From what I’m seeing in Erik’s mind, none of this would have been possible without you.”

Hank flushes and glances quickly at Erik and then back at Charles. He looks like he might die of happiness on the spot. He stares down at his shoes as he mutters, “It…it was nothing.”

Erik snorts at that, but Charles has turned to the two agents, his expression serious once more. They’re exactly where he left them, but now they’re completely still, their faces frozen in expressions that look unnatural if he stares at them for more than a second or two.

“What’s the plan?” Mystique says, jerking her head in their direction.

Charles bites his lip, and then both Black and MacTaggert are moving again, blinking in confusion at the scene in front of them.

“Did you just…” Black is staring at Charles with an expression that’s closer to amazement than anything else. “What’s going on?”

Charles takes a slow step towards them, clasping his hands behind his back and pursing his lips. “This is really more selfishness on my part. I wanted to talk to you one last time.”

“Dr. Xavier,” MacTaggert says, something pleading in her voice. It’s starkly different from her brashness when Erik caught them; Charles is the one who seems to inspire true fear.

“Oh!” Charles says, sounding surprised. “No, no, I’m not going to kill you. Why would I do that?”

“Charles,” Erik says in a low tone. “What are you—”

He can feel the deliberate press of Charles’s telepathy in his mind, like a hand on his shoulder, telling him to be patient.

“I’ve had a bit of time to think,” Charles continues, taking another step forward. “And as much as I don’t like the option I’ve landed on, well, you’ve left me with very little choice.”

“I thought—” MacTaggert presses her lips together, clearly frustrated. “If you can read my mind now, then you can see that this isn’t the way I would have—”

“Yes,” Charles says quietly. “And I appreciate that you both were so cooperative during our conversation—it was a show of good faith. But I’m afraid…” He laughs lightly and shakes his head. “You know, I’m not sure why I’m thanking you for something you won’t remember.”

MacTaggert’s eyes widen. “But—”

Her face goes slack, and then her entire body drops to the ground, like a puppet with its strings cut. Black follows her, landing with a soft thunk.

Charles sits heavily on the folding chair that’s still intact. “You can free them,” he says wearily, gesturing vaguely in their direction. “They’ll be out for hours.”

Erik stares at their slumped bodies as he breaks the metal binding, and then he turns back to Charles. “Did you…?”

“I had to,” Charles says, his voice so soft that it almost seems like he’s speaking to himself. He shakes his head slightly and looks up at the corner of the ceiling. “Can you sense these in every room?”

Erik follows his gaze. There’s a camera mounted there, and as he runs his powers over it, he nods.

“Destroy them, please,” Charles says. “And the computer as well.”

Erik threads his powers through the camera and then presses, snuffing it out like a flame between dampened fingers. He moves to the next room over and locates its camera immediately. There’s something immensely satisfying about destroying them, one by one. When he finally reaches the computer, he sweeps his powers across it and relishes the feeling of frying all that complex circuitry.

“Charles,” Mystique says, stepping towards him. “Should we—”

“Hang on,” Charles says. He gives her a tired smile as he nods at the agents’ bodies. “They aren’t the only ones who know about us. Just…give me a moment.”

Charles shuts his eyes. He looks especially small in the jumpsuit, pale and worn, but it’s completely incongruous with what Erik knows is going on underneath, the terrifying control he’s extended over every mind in the facility, as he repeats whatever he’s just done to MacTaggert and Black.

They all stand in silence for a few minutes, and Charles doesn’t move a muscle. Erik is watching him so closely that he only registers a pair of bodies moving towards them a moment before the door opens.

“God, _finally_,” Angel says, relief blossoming on her face. She leans back into the hallway and shouts, “They’re in here!” She steps into the room with her hands on her hips. “Do you know how creepy it is out there?”

Darwin comes in and closes the door behind him. “Doc, we destroyed the security footage like you—”

Erik holds up a hand. “Charles is…” He frowns. “I’m not sure what Charles is doing.”

Charles seems even paler than he was a few moments ago, something Erik wasn’t even aware was possible, and the corners of his mouth and eyes are pinched. Erik takes a step forward and cautiously reaches out a hand to touch Charles’s shoulder, and Charles’s eyes fly open.

“Erik, we—”

He grasps for Erik’s hand, squeezing tightly, and then suddenly, a burst of energy rushes between them, so strong it nearly knocks the wind out of him. It’s like using the device, but a thousand times more potent. Charles’s power is coursing through him, and it’s so overwhelming that after a few seconds he begins to feel his sense of himself slipping away, until it’s only Charles, in his bloodstream and sparking his nerve endings and filling up his head until it feels like his skull literally cannot contain—

“Erik?”

“I think he’s coming to…”

Erik opens his eyes slowly. His head feels like it’s been split cleanly down the middle, and the light makes it infinitely worse. He’s flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling in confusion.

“What…” He tries to sit up but a wave of dizziness overpowers him. “What’s going on?”

Angel’s face appears in his line of vision. “What did you two just do?”

Erik sits up, pushing past the pain and dizziness. “Is Charles…”

Charles is still sitting on the chair, but he’s slumped over, unmoving, and a thin line of blood is trickling from his nose. Hank and Mystique are hovering anxiously on either side of him.

Angel gives him an uneasy look. “He’s breathing, but…”

There’s a loud bang accompanied by a very familiar smell of sulfur, and Azazel appears, Emma on one arm and Janos on the other.

“What the hell just happened?” Emma says, her hands on her hips. “Did you actually just…” She trails off as she catches sight of Charles, her expression tightening. “We need to get him out of here. Now.”

Azazel steps to the center of the group and they all inch closer. “Where are we going again?”

“Oh, for the love of—” Emma rolls her eyes. She presses two fingers against Azazel’s temple, and after a beat, she says, “You got it?”

Azazel chuckles. “As long as you all hang on tight.”

Everyone puts a hand somewhere on Azazel’s body; Erik and Angel are still on the floor, so they each grip one of his calves. Mystique already has an arm wrapped protectively around her brother’s shoulders, but Erik reaches out with his free hand to thread his fingers between Charles’s unmoving ones, and they vanish in a cloud of sulfur.


	13. Chapter 13

When Charles wakes up, he’s blissfully clear-headed, his mind like the unbroken surface of a pond. He sinks into the feeling of it for a few seconds—until it all comes back in a rush. 

The CIA, the facility, Emma, interrogation, rescue, holding all those people in suspension, the man with the gun, the look on Black’s face, the regret in MacTaggert’s mind, the team and his sister and Erik, most of all Erik, as he traces the time line right up until the moment when—

_Good morning, sunshine_.

He opens his eyes. He’s lying in his own bed wearing his favorite pajamas, and judging from the angle of the sunlight, it’s well past morning. The windows are open, and a warm spring breeze is blowing in. 

Emma is leaning against the doorframe, her arms folded across her chest and a small smile on her face. She’s dressed in a pair of crisp white linen trousers and a cropped white sweater, and her hair, he’d be remiss to neglect noting, looks spectacular. Her smile splits into a dazzling grin. 

_Thank you, sugar_.

His throat feels incredibly dry. He swallows before he rasps out, “How long was I—”

She presses a finger to her lips along with the internal sensation of a shushing sound, and then gestures for him to turn and face the opposite direction.

Erik is lying on the other side of the bed, fully dressed but fast asleep. An open file is laid out on the blanket near his knees, and a trail of papers lead up to the pillow. He’s holding one of them loosely between his fingers, a sure sign that he didn’t actually mean to fall asleep while reading. He looks tense, even in sleep; the corners of his mouth are pinched in a small frown.

_He’s barely slept since we left the facility_, Emma projects, walking into the room and perching at the foot of the bed. _That was three days ago, to answer your question_.

Charles looks at her in alarm. _Is everyone—?_

_We’re all fine—except we weren’t so sure about you. _

He sits up slowly, leaning against the veritable mountain of pillows they’ve left him, and presses his hands against his sternum, as if he’ll be able to tell if everything’s intact just by touch. He feels well enough physically—though he’s strangely tired, considering he’s been lying in bed for days. The only trouble appears to be with his mind.

_Emma, I can’t_… 

Cycling through the final moments he can remember, the start of things is perfectly clear: he erased all trace of mutants from the minds of MacTaggert and Black, and then everyone else in the facility, with a permanent distraction trigger should anyone try to bring up the subject in the future. 

But then Erik put a hand on his shoulder and Charles reached for it—and from that moment on, everything is blank.

_I noticed. _Emma’s frowning now, as she watches him carefully. _I didn’t think it was a good idea to try to force you into consciousness before your body was ready, but I went through your memories shortly after we brought you back here. Once you grabbed Erik’s hand…_

It’s eerily recursive, feeling Emma’s memory of searching his memories, but it all stops short at that blank spot, the enormity of it sitting in the center of his mind. 

_But I didn’t hurt_— 

He looks back down at Erik quickly, just to be certain, even as he feels Emma’s gentle wave of reassurance.

_You knocked him out, _she says._ Knocked each other out, maybe. But he’s fine. I mean, he hasn’t exactly been _fine_ these past few days, though I suppose that’s not surprising._

Charles frowns and studies him for a moment: the pair of worried grooves between his eyebrows, the lock of hair that’s fallen loose across his forehead, the gentle curve of his nose, the sharp line of his cheekbone. He tries to catalogue every detail, even though some more rational part of him knows that with his perfect recall, he’ll remember all of it precisely without even trying. 

But even a passing thought about the general flawlessness of his memory is enough of a reminder that the blank spot looms, an unprecedented anomaly, and it prompts a spiky sort of anxiety in his body and in his head. He shuts his eyes for a moment to try and calm his mind.

_I do have my theories, though_.

Emma pauses and waits until Charles opens his eyes again. He gives her a questioning telepathic nudge.

_It’s just a theory, mind you, _she continues._ But that gap? I think you’re responsible for it_.

He combs through the shape of her thoughts and realizes exactly what she means: that the missing memories aren’t simply the result of however he overextended his powers at the facility, but instead his own mind setting up a protective barrier around whatever happened there. 

_But why would I…? _

He lets the question hang in the air between them. Emma only shrugs. 

_The human mind is complicated enough, but yours, honey? _

Charles rolls his eyes as she shakes in silent laughter. She reaches out to pat his foot through the blankets. 

_I’d better get out of here before he wakes up and I have to witness the sequel to your reunion_. 

Charles sends her the sensation of a playful shove, and she smiles broadly as she exits the room, softly pulling the door shut behind her.

He looks down at Erik again and debates waking him up, but then he remembers Emma saying he’s barely been sleeping and thinks better of it. Instead, he gently pulls the paper from between Erik’s fingers. It’s covered in writing with the CIA seal at the top, and he nearly drops the page when he scans the first paragraph and realizes it’s a long quote from his dissertation. 

He picks up the sheets one by one and puts them in the correct order. The cover page is in the folder; the author is listed as Joseph Harper. Flipping through his memory of their meeting at the CIA, Charles finds him: the agent who, according to McCone, had studied Charles’s work at length, and whose mind was marked out from his fellow agents’ by a healthy dose of academic interest bubbling beneath the standard layer of suspicion. 

He sits back against the pillows and starts to read Harper’s report, placing the pages face-down in the folder as he finishes them. It’s dated from November of last year—six months, more than enough time for the information to circulate and for the CIA to build their facility in response. 

Harper’s writing is cogent, and the only errors Charles spots in the man’s understanding of his work are minor ones. A small but not insignificant part of him remains a bit thrilled that the American government was so interested in his work that they assigned someone to study it in this much depth, and that Harper had done such a good job with it. Of course, that good job directly led to Charles’s own capture and detention—not to mention the capture and detention of others—and he internally kicks himself for taking any pleasure in it whatsoever. 

He’s about ten pages in when Erik starts to stir beside him, his mental presence sliding from the hum of a dreamless sleeping mind to something infinitely brighter and louder—and then, a second later, jolting in surprise.

“Charles?” 

Charles doesn’t say anything—he just closes the folder and carefully sets it on the bedside table before turning back to Erik and leaning down to kiss him deeply. Erik’s surprise cycles to realization and then, crashing through Charles’s mind like a tidal wave, relief, bolstered by such strong feelings of love and affection that Charles has to pull back for a moment to catch his breath. 

Erik frowns. “Did I hurt you?” He reaches up to brush his thumb against the corner of Charles’s eye. Charles realizes then that his eyes are damp. 

“No,” he says quickly. “No, not at all.” He kisses him again, softer this time, and then laughs as he pulls back and says, “I’m sorry, could I trouble you for a glass of water? Three days is a long time to…”

Erik scrambles off the bed immediately, crossing the room to the ensuite. When he returns, he hands Charles the glass and sits down beside him, pressing up against Charles’s hipbone and resting the broad span of his hand lightly across his upper thigh. 

Charles drains the entire glass in one gulp. “God, thank you,” he says when he catches his breath, placing the glass next to the folder on the bedside table. 

“How did you know it was three days?” Erik says, studying his face with a worried expression.

“Emma,” Charles says. “She felt me wake up, and we had a little chat.”

“You should’ve woken—”

“She said you haven’t been sleeping,” Charles interrupts, reaching out to run a hand across the side of Erik’s cheek. Erik looks down at his lap.

“Yes, well…” 

“Hey.” Charles gently lifts Erik’s chin back up until he meets his gaze. “I’m fine. We’re all fine.”

Erik is thinking about a jumble of things at once: the moment he woke up to find Charles was gone, standing in the cell and finally grasping that Charles was alive, watching Charles take a step towards the CIA agents with his hands clasped behind his back, and the blur of the past three days, oscillating between the fallout from the rescue mission and his desire to inch back towards the bedroom, insisting that someone needed to check on Charles. 

Charles leans forward and kisses him a final time before pulling back with what he hopes is a reassuring smile. “My selfish side wants to lock the door and stay here with you for the rest of the day, but we should probably go and tell the others.” He looks down at his pajamas. “Did you pick these out?” 

Erik’s cheeks color slightly and he stands again, ignoring the question. “Let me find your dressing gown.” 

He disappears into the closet, and that’s when Charles notices the open suitcase on one of the chairs by the fireplace, and a few items he doesn’t recognize on the dresser. He looks over at the opposite bedside table, cluttered with Erik’s watch and wallet and a pair of paperbacks he’s never seen before. 

“Did you move your things in here?” 

Erik walks out of the closet holding Charles’s nicest dressing gown and stops short, looking like he’s been caught. He glances quickly at the suitcase and then back to Charles. “I…”

“No, no, don’t worry,” Charles says, laughing. “That’s…I’m very happy that you did.”

Erik approaches him slowly, handing him the dressing gown. “Once I told the group the entire circumstances of your capture, there wasn’t much room for plausible deniability.” 

“Ah.” Charles takes it with a nod of thanks and pulls it on. “Let me guess: Armando took it in stride, Hank did not, and Angel told you that similarly, she prefers the company of women.”

“Angel and I already…” Erik trails off, looking away for a moment, before glancing back at Charles and adding, “Anyway, it was your sister who had the problem.”

Charles frowns. “What did she—”

“We need to have a talk with her,” Erik says, and then the corner of his mouth quirks up and he says, “Or maybe just you.”

Charles reaches over to give him a little shove. “You can’t abandon me here.”

“She’s not _my_ sister.” 

Charles swings his legs around and moves to stand, but his knees quickly give out and he stumbles. Erik catches him, his grip firm as he presses his hands against Charles’s middle.

“Are you sure you’re ready to—”

“I’m fine, darling,” Charles says, stretching up to give him a peck on the cheek. “Just…support me for a bit, all right?”

He leans heavily on Erik as they make their way downstairs, his legs still unsteady but growing surer with every step. He can feel a collection of minds in what his mother used to call the red room, even after they’d redone the entire color scheme; now it’s where they keep the television.

The other four residents of the house are seated on the floor, playing a card game of some sort—or they might have been, before it devolved into whatever they’re arguing about now. Emma is sitting, legs crossed, in a high-backed leather armchair, leafing through a file that looks similar to the one he’d just been reading upstairs. A quick check reveals Azazel and Janos are out running errands; Charles is a little surprised they’re still here, but he’s grateful all the same. 

His sister is waving her arms in Hank’s direction as she shouts, “I don’t know why you think that—” 

One of them must have noticed their arrival because the whole group looks towards the doorway simultaneously, and Raven lets out something close to a shriek, standing and running over to greet him.

“When did you wake up?” she says, squeezing him so hard that it hurts a little.

“Let him breathe,” Erik says, glaring at her. She rolls her eyes as she pulls back.

“About half an hour ago,” he says, and he leans forward to give her a kiss on the cheek. She beams in response. 

He looks at Erik and gestures to the sofa. “Do you mind…?” Erik nods, and carefully helps him sit down, before taking up a position looming behind him like some sort of bodyguard, his hands on his hips.

“How are you feeling, Doc?” Armando says gently. 

“It’s ironic, considering I spent the past three days in bed, but in all honesty, I’m quite tired,” Charles says. He laughs lightly to signal that he’s not terribly concerned about it, and they all follow suit. He doesn’t add anything about the gap in his memory, though Emma clearly catches him thinking about it and gives him a knowing look. 

“We don’t have to do a full debrief now,” he continues. “But I would like to know where the CIA file that extensively quotes my work came from.” He gestures to Emma. “And that goes for whatever you’re reading right now as well.”

“Right,” Erik says. He pauses for a moment, and then he steps around and sits next to Charles, leaving a careful amount of space between them. “We went to Virginia two days ago, to Black’s main facility.” 

“We?”

“Erik, Hank, Mystique, and me,” Emma says. “With transportation by Azazel, of course.” 

“We weren’t…” Hank clears his throat. “We didn’t know what you’d done, and we were worried about the paper trail.” 

Charles looks at him sharply. “What do you mean, what I’d done?”

“Well, we’re still not totally sure,” Raven says. “But we now know that _someone_ gave everybody in that facility a command to start shredding mutant-related documents ASAP.”

“And by the time we got there, there was almost nothing left,” Erik says. “We grabbed everything we could find.” 

Charles’s mouth opens slightly. “I…but that’s a different site entirely.” He skims the surface of Hank’s mind for the location. “It’s what, 300 miles away from where we were being held?”

Raven’s eyes narrow. “You don’t remember ordering them to do that?”

He tries to reign in his outward expression of shock as he sorts through his memories before the gap one more time. Emma is watching him, her brows drawn.

_I’m sorry I didn’t mention this earlier_, she projects, sounding genuinely contrite. Charles sends her the sensation of a dismissive gesture and an assurance that it’s fine. 

“OK then,” he says, putting his palms flat down on his thighs and trying to order his thoughts. “Anything else of note happen while you were there?”

Emma shakes her head. “Between my telepathy, your sister’s shapeshifting, Hank’s knowledge of the facility, and Erik’s penchant for frying electronics…”

Erik shrugs. “There wasn’t much for us to do. You’d already had them do it for us.”

Charles shakes his head, and suddenly he knows what he has to do. He looks over at Erik and puts a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go downstairs—I need to use the device.”

Erik’s lips press into a flat line. “Absolutely not.” 

“I need to figure out exactly what I commanded them to—”

“You were unconscious for _three days_,” Erik interrupts, his voice shaking slightly. “I won’t—” He shrugs off Charles’s hand, standing and crossing back behind the sofa to pace. 

Erik’s mind is swirling angrily, his protectiveness turning so razor-sharp that Charles would laugh if it wasn’t a wholly inappropriate response—only Erik could manage to so thoroughly weaponize his desire to keep Charles from further harm. But he can acknowledge that Erik’s worry isn’t baseless, especially not while there’s such a large question mark sitting in the center of his mind.

_I’m sorry_, he projects softly. Erik stops pacing and turns to look at him, his eyes narrowed.

_Why can’t you see—_

_I can_, Charles cuts in. _It’s why I’m apologizing_. 

Erik doesn’t send him anything specific—he just continues to give off a tangle of conflicting emotions, anger and fear and frustration and love. Charles stretches his telepathy back in response, slowly wrapping his mind in an apologetic embrace. Erik comes to stand just behind him again, and he rests a hand on the back of the sofa, so close to Charles’s head that they’re nearly touching, but not quite. 

“Setting that aside for now,” Charles says loudly, fully aware that the group has been watching their silent exchange. “I apparently haven’t eaten anything in three days…”

Angel nods and stands. “It’s probably about time to start making dinner,” she says. She holds out a hand to Raven. “You want to help?” 

Raven takes her hand and hauls herself up, and they continue holding hands for a few moments longer before Raven glances over at them and then pulls back. She looks at Angel skeptically. “Are you just going to boss me around and make me carry things?”

Angel winks at her. “Yep.” 

Charles takes a very long shower and then dresses for dinner. Azazel and Janos return just before the food is ready, and they all gather in the dining room off the smaller kitchen they’ve been using for the past month. They nearly fill up the table, and Charles is instructed to sit at the head, with Erik on one side and Raven on the other. 

It’s noisy and playful and warm, and as the collective good feelings of the group wash over him, he tries to remember the last time this many people sat at this table—and for that matter, if he’s ever been anywhere in this house surrounded by so many minds so happy to be together. It feels familial, or at least what he’s always gathered families were meant to be like from glimpses sensed in other peoples’ minds. 

He glances over at Emma, half expecting her to pop into his thoughts with accusations of gross sentimentality, but she’s throwing her head back with laughter and placing a hand on Armando’s shoulder as he delivers the punchline to a joke. 

Charles reaches under the table to rest his hand on Erik’s knee. Erik doesn’t look at him, but his mind is radiating fondness as he places his hand on top of Charles’s own.

They skip their chess game as well as their nightcap, since Erik has made him promise not to drink until he’s passed some sort of arbitrary Erik-sanctioned health check. They’re both relatively quiet as they get ready for bed. Charles pauses as he’s buttoning his pajama top to watch Erik strip off his undershirt, the exquisitely defined lines of his torso as predictably distracting as always.

He clears his throat. “If using the device today is out,” he says slowly. “I assume that…” He finishes the thought by simply pushing a waft of arousal in Erik’s direction. 

It’s a little crass, he’ll admit, but it gets the message across clearly. An almost hilarious number of emotions flash across Erik’s face in quick succession, from confusion to annoyance to genuine interest, before he settles on giving Charles an extremely stern look as he crosses over to the bed. 

“Please take this seriously,” he says, pulling back the covers and climbing into bed. Once Charles joins him, he turns off the lights with his powers. 

Charles presses up against him, trailing his fingers in a slow line down Erik’s bare chest. “I don’t even need anything tonight, you know. I can just take care of…” He pauses at the space just above the waistband of Erik’s boxers and rests his hand there, lightly.

There’s a long silence and Charles doesn’t need to peek to know Erik is considering it, before he takes a deep breath and says firmly, “No.”

Charles runs his thumb under the elastic and says, “Are you absolutely—”

“Let’s—” Erik takes his hand and pulls it up a bit higher, resting his own hand firmly on top of it. “You need to rest.”

Charles presses his forehead against Erik’s neck and laughs softly. “I think I’ve done more than my share of resting recently, but fine, have it your way.” He gently kisses the space just below Erik’s ear.

Erik pulls back slightly to look at him, and Charles can just make out his features in the sliver of moonlight peeking from behind the drapes. “I’m glad you’re OK,” Erik whispers.

Charles smiles. “I am, too.” He kisses him slowly, wrapping up all of his feelings of gratitude and sending them over in a rolling wave, and Erik reaches an arm out to tug him closer.

Erik falls asleep still holding him tightly, and as Charles lays there, he attempts to sort through the enormity of his thoughts: what they’ve done, what they will do, and Erik, gripping him like he’s afraid he’ll vanish in the night again. And then he thinks about the hole in his memory, prodding at it from every angle for what feels like an eternity, until he finally drifts off to sleep.

He wakes up a few hours later with a start. Erik hasn’t moved, and he’s pressing Charles down into the mattress, effectively trapping him in place. He works to steady his erratic breathing, and then he tries to center his mind—it feels like tugging a hundred ropes towards a single point simultaneously. 

It’s then that he realizes: he remembers everything.

*

Charles doesn’t have many memories of his father in this house; they’d barely been here a year when he died, and he’d spent much of that time in Washington and New York City. 

His stronger impressions are actually his father’s memories of his own boyhood here, which resurfaced with startling clarity when they’d arrived in America. Charles was six at the time, and he’d looked at each one in great detail, utterly fascinated, once he realized what he was seeing.

But he can remember one conversation, not long after they’d moved to the house, during the period when Charles was still getting lost in its halls on a daily basis. One wrong turn that afternoon and he’d wound up in the largest of the kitchens, but before the cook had shooed him out, he’d overheard a bit of news on the wireless, reporting on the casualties of what he would later realize was the height of the Battle of Britain. 

His father was in his study—the room Charles would eventually claim for the same purpose—sorting through an enormous stack of papers. He was doing mental calculations, one of his favorite things to think about, though the formulas were far too complex for Charles to understand. 

He looked up and noticed Charles lingering in the doorway, gesturing for him to come in as he removed his reading glasses. Whether Charles was outright projecting his worry or whether he simply looked upset, his father frowned and said, “What’s wrong, Charles?”

He crossed the room and his father pushed the stack of papers to the side. Charles was small for his age, small enough that his father could still easily pick him up and hoist him onto the desk. He swung his legs back and forth as he asked, “When is the war going to end?” 

His father’s frown grew tighter. “Likely not for quite some time, I’m afraid.”

“But how will they know to stop it?” 

His father was thinking about many things simultaneously as he tried to pick out the right answer for a six-year-old boy. After a long pause, he said, “When one side surrenders. Usually because they’ve run out of resources—things to fight with—or because they’ve suffered so many losses.”

“But…” Charles tried to follow this logic through. “Why bother fighting at all?” 

His father cocked his head. “What do you mean?” 

“If you know who has the most weapons,” Charles said. “Can’t you just say so before you start?”

His father blinked at him. “That’s…” He cleared his throat and put a gentle hand on Charles’s forearm. “Let’s not talk about such gruesome subjects, all right?” He glanced at his watch and said, “I think it’s high time I took a break from all this work—shall we play a game of chess?”

It was only when he was older that Charles was able to revisit the conversation and make sense of his father’s conflicted thoughts: that he didn’t know how to tell his son that war was as much about people profiting from loss as it was about fighting for any cause. Or that the idea of deterrence through force was its own sort of hell—a world living in perpetual fear of one nation or another—and the great irony of the observation coming from his own son, if the weapons he and his colleagues were working to create actually came to fruition.

Charles stands in the same study now, looking out at the unending stretch of carefully tended lawn. It’s been five days since he woke up, and he’s finally managed to shake the lingering exhaustion that had been plaguing him, but his mind remains mired in everything that happened a week ago.

He can sense Erik approaching the study cautiously, and then there’s a light knock at the door. 

_You don’t need to knock, you know_, he projects.

Erik doesn’t say anything as he enters the room, and Charles doesn’t turn as he continues to stare out the window. Erik comes to stand beside him, hesitating for a moment before reaching to wrap an arm around Charles’s shoulders. Charles leans into him, relishing the feeling of the unbroken press of contact, and he sends Erik a cloud of warm affection.

“Are you going to brood in here all day?” Erik says softly.

Charles snorts. “Heaven help me, if _you’re _accusing _me_ of brooding…” 

Erik snakes his free arm across to nudge him in the ribs, and Charles laughs. 

“Honestly though,” Charles continues. “I’m fine.”

_You’re not_, Erik thinks, and Charles is certain he wasn’t meant to hear that. 

“It’s just going to take me a little bit of time…” He trails off, uncertain how to end the sentence. Will he wake up one morning and decide he’s fine with the lines that he’s crossed? Will he come, in time, to declare those lines satisfactory, and then set new ones never to be breached—until the next crisis comes along?

Erik, to his credit, hasn’t dismissed his melancholy, out loud or even in his mind. The morning after his memories had returned, Charles had sat on the bed and explained what had happened when they’d joined hands at the facility: how he’d lost control and used Erik’s powers to vastly amplify his own, stretching his mind all the way to Washington. 

That first day when the CIA agents had knocked on their door, he’d incredulously told Erik that if he started to meddle with their minds, he’d eventually have to wipe the minds of everyone in the federal government. But that afternoon at the facility, that’s exactly what he’d done: any hint of an interest in mutants was plucked out and squashed, mind by mind. 

He’d instructed them to destroy all physical and computer records, wherever they’d been kept, and he left the suggestion that the facility where he and the others had been held—now just an ordinary site in the minds of everyone who’d once known its true purpose—had been the scene of a violent escape from a small group of mentally unstable detainees who had been killed in the process, with no need to investigate further.

And he left the minds he touched with an especially firm lingering command: at future mentions of anything even resembling mutants, they would become suddenly distracted, their thoughts shifting just slightly away. As for the handful of people who were actually mutants themselves, hiding in plain sight in the ranks of these agencies, he’d performed a sort of mental sleight-of-hand, keeping their personal experiences of mutation intact while diverting them from any larger ideas about the government’s involvement in their lives.

Erik had listened to all of this in silence, his mind steadily focused on Charles as he spoke, and then he’d simply nodded and said that Charles had done what needed to be done. 

He’s fully aware, from his time in Erik’s head, that Erik would have been happy to blow the entire facility sky-high, no matter who was inside; for that matter, he would have been happy to do as much to the CIA headquarters itself and every last one of their secret “research” sites. Charles didn’t kill anyone, Erik has thought with confusion more than once in the past few days, as Charles fretted over the consequences of his actions; surely this wasn’t so grave a situation.

But he knows Erik’s thoughts on the matter in intimate detail, and while Erik cannot inherently see Charles’s point of view, he understands—and respects—Charles enough to grasp why he’s upset. 

Erik takes a deep breath, as if to speak. Charles reaches up to squeeze the hand that’s draped over his shoulder, and Erik sighs. “I was thinking.”

Charles summons all of his willpower not to peek. “Yes?”

“I’ll say up front that I don’t actually approve of this,” Erik says slowly. “But I believe you when you say that you’re feeling fully recovered, physically. So I suppose, if you’d like to use the—”

Charles pulls back slightly and turns to face him with a grin. Erik is frowning, but his expression softens when he meets Charles’s eyes. “But only for a few minutes,” he finishes quietly.

Charles goes up on his tip-toes to kiss him thoroughly, running his fingers through his hair and pushing a wave of happiness in his direction. Erik squeezes his shoulders and then pulls back.

“When I say ‘a few minutes,’ I truly mean it,” he says, trying for stern and not quite succeeding.

“Yes, darling,” Charles says, kissing the corner of his mouth. 

Hank and Erik check over the device as Charles pulls on the headpiece, and he can’t help but overhear Hank’s loud suspicions that Charles has used telepathy to trick Erik into agreeing to this. He lets out a small laugh, and Hank looks back at him with a frown.

Charles puts on an innocent smile. “Are we ready?” 

Erik doesn’t smile back, but he nods. “Five minutes, maximum,” he says. “Use it wisely.”

The current starts at a trickle, slower than Erik’s ever done it before, until Charles gives him a little impatient mental nudge and he increases the power with a resigned sigh. Charles opens his mind as wide as he can. It feels like he’s stretching his legs after a long time sitting—it’s enough to remind him how natural it feels to blanket his telepathy over everything, even as he’s spent the past few days worrying over his powers and their reach.

He zeroes in on the facility in Virginia and quickly finds Agent Black, who’s reading a slog of a report with a relatively cheerful disposition. Charles shuffles through his mind, then the minds of Black’s closest colleagues, and then as much of the facility as he can capture in a single sweep. 

He heads north again, first to Langley and then to Washington, where Agents MacTaggert and Levine are driving up Pennsylvania Avenue and discussing an upcoming meeting with their counterparts at the FBI. There’s no strain in their conversation, and their minds are marked, as they’ve always been, by incredibly clear focus. All of their memories of the past month, save any mention of mutants or their trip to Westchester or MacTaggert’s time in West Virginia, are fully intact. It’s so smooth, in fact, that they don’t know that there are any memories to miss. 

MacTaggert’s thoughts are drifting now, and she’s thinking about taking some time off in the next few months, since she hasn’t seen her mother in close to a year.

The current decreases at a carefully controlled rate, and then Erik is gently lifting the headpiece off and studying his face.

“Are you—”

“I’m fine,” Charles says softly. “Thank you for that.” He glances over at Hank, who has his back to them as he fusses with the device, and then he reaches out to give Erik’s hand a quick squeeze.

Charles leaves Erik with Hank to inspect the circuitry, a clear enough sign that for all his protests, Erik intends to use the device with him going forward. They’ll need it, if they’re going to locate more mutants; in their conversations over the past few days, they’ve both been in agreement that no matter what the government knows about them, now or ten years from now, they should continue the plan from before Charles was captured, bringing as many mutants as they can into the fold—showing them that they aren’t alone.

He heads upstairs and then out through the back of the house, to a bench in the gardens where he and Raven often sat as children. Whoever Stevens has hired to revive the gardens, they’ve done a remarkable job in such a short space of time, a burst of meticulously arranged color surrounding him on three sides. He can almost see a tiny Raven, laughing as she runs through the rows of flowers wearing a little sundress and her natural form, once Charles assured her that the coast was clear.

Thinking of Raven and their childhood makes him think absently of that first dinner he and Erik shared, as Charles explained what he’d had to do to make Raven his sister and Erik had stared at him, wide-eyed, and said, “So you just altered reality, for everyone, at every turn, to suit your needs? For years on end?”

The damning thing isn’t necessarily that he’s just done as much on a vastly more dramatic scale—though that’s undeniably the worst of it, by a factor too large to name. But as he thinks back across the years, it’s painfully clear that he’s always been shifting the world to suit his needs, at least to some degree. Certainly as a child, perhaps even when he was too young to remember. 

As relieved as he is to see the people he altered living largely unaltered lives, a tight knot of dread sits firmly in the pit of his stomach when he thinks about the future that he’s set up for their kind: one where he alone has the power to decide who gets to know about mutants, and when they get to know it. For all that he argued for prudence, he would never have advocated for explicit control over how soon the world learned about mutation. And yet.

“Hey.” 

He nearly jumps as he looks up to see Raven standing there, wearing a yellow dress that falls just above her knees, her blue feet bare against the stone pathway. 

He stares at her and for a split second he worries that he accidentally summoned her here just by thinking about her, shaking the thought from his head with a laugh.

“What are you chuckling about?” she says, sitting next to him on the bench and giving him a light shove.

While she’s been much friendlier towards him, even affectionate, these past few days, they haven’t actually been alone together since he’s woken up—though come to think of it, he inwardly winces, he’s not sure that they’ve talked one-on-one since he’s come back to America. 

He shifts to face her. Her bright red hair, pushed back with a headband that matches her dress, gleams in the sunlight, “I was actually just thinking about you a moment ago,” he says. “About how we used to enjoy this bit of the gardens so much.”

“I still enjoy this bit,” she says, giving him a small smile. “I’ve been coming out here over the past few weeks, whenever I needed a little space.”

“You know, space really shouldn’t be an issue, we have literally dozens of rooms,” he says, raising an eyebrow. “Probably close to a hundred.”

She laughs as she says, “You sound like Erik.” 

He joins in her laughter. “Someday he will have a thought about this house that isn’t underscored by a massive amount of derision, and I will mark that day on the calendar.”

Her smile fades, her expression growing serious. “So…” 

He tries for the most patient look he can manage as he waits for her to continue. The desire to peek is a soft but intrusive whisper in the back of his mind that he does his best to swat away.

“So you think…” She bites her lip, looking unsure. “Are you planning on staying together then?”

“Ah,” he says, relaxing slightly. “Well as much as one plans for these things, yes, I hope so. I don’t have any plans to the contrary, if that’s what you’re asking, and as far as I know, Erik doesn’t, either.”

“So you…” 

He continues to resist the urge to peek, but he has a sense of what she’s thinking about. He nods and says, “I do.” 

“That’s good.” She looks down at the ground for a moment. “You know, you could have told me.”

“About Erik?” Charles sighs. “We haven’t been having a lot of heart to hearts in recent weeks.”

“No, about…” Raven looks up at him, and there’s something searching in her expression. She takes a deep breath and says, “I didn’t know that you liked men as well as women.”

To his embarrassment, he feels his cheeks faintly heat up at that, and it’s his turn to look away. “It’s not like discussing your sex life with your sister—”

“Excuse me,” she cuts in. “You’re the one who brought a _parade_ of women through every flat we’ve ever lived in.”

Charles pinches the bridge of his nose. “OK, point taken. It’s just…” He looks up at her. “It shouldn’t be, but it’s different. And in retrospect, it was obviously a bad assumption on my part, but I never told you because I wasn’t sure how you would feel about it, or what you would say.”

She’s watching him carefully, and she nods as she says, “I know what that’s like.” 

He realizes then that for all the times he worried over her potential reaction if she were to learn about his occasional and very circumspect evenings with men, she never would have felt comfortable telling him about her own preferences—not when he spent so much time asking her to change herself to blend in, attempting to keep her “normal” to keep her safe. 

“For what it’s worth,” he says, giving her a smile. “I think Angel is a wonderful young woman.”

She smiles back even as she rolls her eyes. “You’re not even 30 yet, how do you sound so much like an old man?” 

Charles chooses to ignore the dig, and he hesitantly puts a hand on his sister’s arm. “In fact, I was wondering,” he says slowly. “Once we start solidifying our list of potential mutants to contact, perhaps you and Angel might like to work together?”

Her mouth falls opens slightly. “You mean like…travel together?”

He shrugs. “It seems like you make a fine team, and I think you’d be an especially good person for young women to talk to.” He laughs ruefully as he rubs the back of his head. “Far better than either Erik or I would be, anyway.”

She doesn’t say anything—she just lets out a small noise and then leans in to hug him, burying her face in the crook of his neck. For all the times she’s hugged him recently, this is the one that hits him in the center of his chest, and he feels like he might cry as he wraps his arms around her in return. 

“I may continue to be an utter fool,” he says softly. “But please don’t forget that I will always love you, Mystique.” 

She squeezes him tighter, and then he can feel it: she’s sending him the faintest hint of a projection, tentative but hopeful, and he basks in the warmth of it as he squeezes her back.

*

“You responsible for this too, Doc?” 

Armando slaps the newspaper down on the kitchen table, and Charles glances at it before looking back at him. “Pardon me?”

“Fiddle with the president’s mind when you were sweeping through DC, that sort of thing?” Armando waves his fingers in the general vicinity of his temple. Over by the coffee maker, Angel lets out a laugh.

His tone is teasing, but Charles grabs the newspaper in a panic. The headline reads, _RENEWED NUCLEAR TALKS SIGNAL WARMING OF U.S.-U.S.S.R. RELATIONS_. He skims the article, his relief at the news that nuclear war is no longer immediately imminent battling with his increasing worry that his telepathic meddling may have had something to do with it.

“I didn’t do a thing,” he says quickly. “Beyond turning the CIA’s interest away from building some sort of Cold War telepathy force—I didn’t even touch the rest of that dreadful program.” 

He’s thought about that with a great deal of regret over the past few weeks—even toyed with going back in the device and revisiting some of the key players, based on his conversation with the agents about MKULTRA, to see if he could try and mitigate the worst of their plans. But he catches himself every time, because surely the impulse to continually dive in and reorder peoples’ minds on a grand scale is the line he should be working not to cross again.

Hank pulls the newspaper across the table and starts to read the article. Emma enters the kitchen in one of her standard all-white numbers and grabs a grapefruit from a bowl on the counter.

“Good morning, Angel, gentlemen,” she says, nodding at each of them as she pulls out a knife to slice the grapefruit in half. “Charles, why are you giving off such massive waves of alarm?”

“He’s worried that he invaded President Kennedy’s mind and told him to play nice with the Russians,” Angel says, giving him a sly smile.

Charles is about to protest when Hank pushes the paper towards him. “This just brings us back to where we were a few months ago, though,” he says with a frown. “It’s still a stalemate.” 

“You gotta admit, though,” Armando says with a shrug. “That sounds a hell of a lot better than nuclear war.”

“I honestly don’t see how I could have had anything to do with this,” Charles says, tapping his spoon lightly against his teacup. “I’ve looked through a great number of minds in the federal government since we left the facility, and I’m quite certain that I only touched their thoughts on mutants.”

“Honey.” Emma gives him a pitying smile as she sits down next to him. “You know it doesn’t work like that. You have no way of knowing if your actions altered one small thing, and then another, and then another.”

“But everything’s like that!” he says as his spoon clatters against the saucer. “We have no idea about all the little things that have massive consequences.”

“Exactly,” she says with a satisfied smile, delicately scooping out a grapefruit wedge. “We talk about history like the things that happened were inevitable. But that’s not how the world works.”

“But that doesn’t mean—”

“No one’s saying you brainwashed the president, sugar,” she says with a laugh. “But these things might be connected, and you’ll probably never know for sure. You’re just going to have to learn to live with that.”

Charles puts his elbow on the table and rests his forehead against his hand. 

Emma sends him a little telepathic nudge. “Where’s Erik?” 

He looks up. “Jogging.” He glances at his watch. “He’s been out there for quite some time now…with Mystique.” 

Emma gives him a gentle smile, and he knows she’s pleased that he’s making an honest effort with his sister, even if he slips up and nearly calls her by the wrong name every third time. 

“Azazel and Janos will be coming by around eleven,” she says. “Let’s have a team meeting?”

Charles smiles and nods. “Sounds perfect.” He turns to Hank. “I have a few thoughts about the experiment you were outlining yesterday, Hank, if you want to go and take a look?” 

He takes in the twin sensations of Hank’s enthusiasm and Emma’s approval as they stand to head down to the lab. 

He’d been more than a little surprised when, a few weeks ago, Emma had told them that she was going to stay in the Westchester house for the foreseeable future rather than heading back to Manhattan, as Azazel and Janos were planning to do. But when he brought it up later that evening, Erik had just looked at him in confusion.

“Can’t you tell how much she likes you?”

“Me?” Charles had placed a hand on his chest. “She likes _you_, that much has always been clear. With me, it’s just…”

“Telepaths,” Erik said, shaking his head with a smile.

“I won’t deny there’s a certain ease to communicating with another—”

“Yes,” Erik cut in, his expression cooling. “I noticed.”

Charles took a quick look and let out an involuntary laugh, stepping towards Erik and placing his hands on his waist. “Jealousy seems to be a recurring theme with you, hm?” 

“Are you sure you can read minds?” Erik shot back, glaring down at him. “Because the fact that you’re so wildly off-base whenever you—”

Charles laughed into his mouth as he cut him off with a kiss. 

Emma has been a much-needed counterbalance when it comes to both short-term leadership and longer-term strategizing; for all of the natural seamlessness between two telepaths, her general view of the world aligns with Erik’s more often than not, which leaves the three of them to meet somewhere in the middle. And while he’s working to think of his sister and the others as proper adults, they’re still quite young; Emma is a few years older than Erik and has been traveling the world looking for mutants for more than two years now, making her well of experience invaluable. 

At eleven they gather in what was formerly known as the blue room, which won the role of their base of operations a week ago; Erik took great pleasure in using his powers to tack up more than a dozen maps of the United States, as well as a few from other parts of the world. 

When Hank and Charles arrive, Armando, Angel, and Emma are already there, gathered around a magazine that Armando’s holding open. Azazel pops in directly with Janos gripping his arm, and a minute later Erik sweeps into the room, engaged in a heated discussion with Mystique. Charles sends him the phantom sensation of a teasing pinch by way of greeting, and Erik pauses whatever he was saying to glance over at Charles with a smirk.

_Can you save it for later, gentlemen?_

Emma’s clearly projected it into both of their heads, because Erik starts and turns to glare at her. 

“All right,” Charles says loudly, clapping his hands together. “Shall we get things started?”

They all take their seats, Mystique sitting beside him on the sofa and Erik in the chair directly next to him. Erik holds up the notebook that contains their master list of mutants to seek out. They keep it in a safe whenever they aren’t updating it, the lock melted down and then reformed as it’s removed and returned. 

“As we’ve been discussing,” Erik says, flipping the notebook open. “It’s time for most of us to get out on the road. There are a few people Charles has located in southern California—”

“I was thinking,” Charles cuts in, looking at his sister. “This batch would be the ideal assignment for Angel and Mystique, particularly because Angel is from Los Angeles.” He catches Angel’s gaze and adds, “Just in case you want to visit any family while you’re out there.” 

He’d be hard pressed to say what was stronger, Mystique’s broad grin or the feeling of joy radiating off her. She leans over and gives him a firm kiss on the cheek.

Angel is watching them with a wry smile. “Look, anytime you want to pay for me to go and visit my cousins…” 

“Fantastic,” Erik says, marking the notebook with a pen. He glances over the page, and then he makes a face. “Someone needs to go to _Indiana_.” He looks closer and then his expression clears as he adds, “To talk to a boy who shoots lasers out of his chest.” He looks at Charles. “We’re taking this one.” 

Charles laughs. “I’m excited for you to experience the majesty of the American midwest.”

Erik rolls his eyes towards the ceiling, but he marks the notebook again.

“We have a problem to discuss, but also a potential course of action,” Emma says, gesturing to Azazel and Janos. “The material the CIA used, that telepathy-proof metal?”

Erik’s expression turns stormy as he says, “Yes?”

“Charles, you said that you read from the agents’ minds that they’d taken it off the Soviets?” 

“I did,” he confirms with a nod. “Though it’s my understanding that they picked it up without quite knowing what they had on their hands, until it worked on you. They threw that cell together while they were keeping you sedated.”

The remnants of the cell, along with all the helmets they could find, are sitting in large sealed container down in the lab, after Azazel and Emma, thinking quickly, popped back to collect them immediately after they dropped him, unconscious, back at the house. Charles catches Erik thinking about it from time to time, along with absent worries about any more of the material the CIA might have in their possession; Charles has tried to reassure him that without a knowledge of telepaths, they won’t be able to turn it against him again, not anytime soon, at least—though his recent experiences have thoroughly taught him not to dismiss those worries out of hand.

“But the CIA didn’t know who developed the material in the first place, did they?” Emma says. “Or why?” He can feel the pieces sliding around in her mind.

“Correct,” he says. “Hang on, you’re not thinking of going back to Russia?”

“Just for a few days,” she says quickly. “Azazel’s called one of his sources, and we have a hunch.”

Charles glances over at Erik, who’s looking at him in turn. They barely need telepathy to engage in a wordless exchange, before Erik turns back to Emma with a sigh.

“You’ll return in a week—or less.” There’s no hint of a question in his voice.

“Don’t worry, I have no desire to spend another four months traipsing around over there,” Emma says, waving a hand. She catches the look on Azazel’s face and she laughs. “Sorry honey, you know what I mean.” She looks back to Charles and Erik and says, “We’ll make it as quick as we can.” 

Charles nods. “Be sure to check in regularly.” He taps his temple. “Or I will.” 

“I love it when you threaten me, sugar,” she says, her tone half mocking and half flirtatious. He can feel a little flare of Erik’s jealousy, though when he looks over at him, Erik’s expression is carefully neutral. 

“All right,” Charles says, reaching over to lightly pat the notebook in Erik’s hand. “We’ve also got a number of more local leads for the Manhattan house, if you chaps don’t mind passing them along before you leave.” He nods to Janos and Azazel, and Janos nods in return.

“And I guess I’ll hold down the fort with Hank, then?” Armando says with an easy smile. “Just as long as I get the next trip to California.”

Charles chuckles. “Yes, thank you. And speaking of—Hank, would you like to debrief them on what we’ve been discussing this morning?” 

Hank brightens and sits up a bit straighter. “I’ve done some tests on my initial hypothesis, and the results are very promising, actually.” He pulls out the diagram he outlined for Charles down in the lab, and they all lean closer to look. “So I was thinking about the nature of mutation…”

Charles catches Erik’s eye again, and he reaches out to press two fingers lightly against Erik’s knee. Erik gives him a small smile, but there’s a great swell of emotion behind it, and they continue to gaze at each other while the others ask Hank about his plans.

This is the future, Charles thinks as he looks back at the group, his sister extending a long blue finger to point at something on Hank’s diagram. He focuses on the discussion, but Erik’s knee remains warm beneath his fingers, his mind softly whirring as it nudges up against his own.


	14. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it! I just want to thank **[araydre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/araydre/pseuds/araydre)** one more time for her incredible art throughout, and **[1degosuperego](https://archiveofourown.org/users/1degosuperego)** for her tireless beta work (and for harassing me—in the best possible way—to write things and post them on the internet). And thank you so much to everyone who’s commented/kudosed/read so far—I appreciate it so much!! You can find me on tumblr at [x-populuxe](https://x-populuxe.tumblr.com). <3

There are several inches of snow on the ground when Erik treks out across the lawn. He stops beneath the tree beside the lake, which froze over a few weeks ago—the tableau looks beautifully still, almost bleak, in the mid-afternoon light. After all the ruckus inside the house, he’s immensely grateful for the silence.

He stands with his feet slightly apart and his hands facing palm-up at his sides. It’s counter-intuitive, since he usually aligns his powers _with_ the earth’s electromagnetic fields, but now he has to push against them, trying to use that resistance to float upwards. He manages a few inches at first, then pushes a bit harder; before long he’s hovering three feet above the ground, taking deep, slow breaths of frosty air.

He opens his eyes and looks down, and then he starts to laugh, marveling at the fact that he’s actually floating, almost flying even. He closes his eyes again to push even farther upwards—

“Alex, no!”

There’s a shriek, and he plummets as his concentration breaks, his fall mostly cushioned by the snow. He squints out across the grounds and stretches his powers towards the house: four sets of zippers on winter jackets, moving erratically as they duck and weave.

“Oh, no you don’t!” someone shouts. Erik sighs.

He stomps back in their direction, and as he gets closer, he sees Mystique, Darwin, Alex, and Scott engaged in a spirited snowball fight. Darwin’s turned his body to ice to deflect hits from Mystique’s admittedly impressive throwing arm, and Alex is pummeling his younger brother with snow using a little more force than seems appropriate given their respective ages.

Scott catches a snowball to the chest and he stumbles. As he hits the ground, his glasses slip off, and a jet of red light shoots across the snow, missing Erik by about a foot and leaving a long sizzling trail in its wake.

Alex looks stricken. “God, Scotty, I’m so sorry—”

Erik draws up his sternest voice as he approaches them. “What on earth is going on here?”

Mystique, Darwin, and Alex all recoil slightly at his tone, but as Scott moves to look up at him, both Erik and Alex step forward with their hands outstretched.

“Scott!” Alex snaps. “Cover your eyes.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Scott mumbles, sounding miserable as he presses his hands against his eyes.

Erik sighs and picks up Scott’s now-broken glasses. “Hold these up to your eyes and come with me,” he says, tugging the boy lightly by his zipper as he heads back towards the house.

He marches Scott down to the lab, where Hank is transferring something from a pipette to a beaker with delicate precision. Still using his powers, Erik lifts Scott up gently by his zipper and deposits him a few feet from Hank, who startles and drops both pieces of equipment on the table.

“He’s a ten-year-old boy,” Erik says flatly before Hank can say anything. “You need to make these things indestructible, or he’s going to accidentally slice someone’s leg off.”

Hank’s eyes widen and he rushes forward to examine Scott’s broken glasses. Erik turns on his heel and heads back upstairs.

He can feel Charles by his watch, sitting at the desk in his study. He pulls off his gloves, coat, and scarf as he walks down the hall. Someone is shouting in the vicinity of the front parlor, and a few moments later, he hears a loud thump overhead, presumably in the hallway directly above him. He rolls his eyes as he continues in Charles’s direction; if he investigated every noise that teenagers made, he wouldn’t have a single moment of the day to himself.

He opens the door without knocking and tosses his winter things on the closest chair, then uses his powers to lock the door behind him.

Charles is on the phone, but he looks up and gives him a wide smile, sending over a telepathic pulse of affection. Then the smile slips from his face and he sighs into the phone.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s the correct conclusion _at all_,” he says, using the sniffy, extra-posh voice that he only pulls out when he’s feeling truly impatient. Charles clearly catches that thought, because he looks over at Erik and narrows his eyes.

After a beat, he looks even more annoyed. “My apologies, Hayes, but I’m afraid something’s just come up—can we postpone the rest of this conversation until we all meet in the city next week?”

Erik crosses around to slip into the space between Charles and his desk, spreading his legs wide to straddle Charles’s thighs. Charles grips the phone tighter as he glares up at him.

“No, that’s probably true, it’s just—”

Erik leans forward, resting his knees on either side of Charles’s thighs and bending down to press his lips against his neck. Charles uses his free hand to attempt to bat him away, but Erik just chuckles and ignores him.

_Erik, I swear to God_, Charles projects, his mental voice sounding half frustrated and half aroused, overlaid with a light layer of warning.

“All right, I’ll concede that point, at a minimum,” he says into the phone, and Erik is impressed that he’s able to keep his tone so even.

Charles pulls back and raises an eyebrow. _Who do you take me for?_

Erik leans forward again and laughs into his neck, pulling his collar down to bite him softly on the clavicle. He feels Charles shudder beneath him and take a deep breath.

“Well, until next Wednesday, then,” he says quickly. “Yes, yes, looking forward to it.”

He reaches around Erik to hang up the phone, and then he shoves him back slightly, his lips pursed in a small frown. “One of these days I’m going to murder you, you know.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Erik says, leaning forward again and kissing him squarely on the lips. Charles laughs into his mouth, yanking Erik’s shirt from his trousers and running his hands up his sides, his fingers soft and warm against Erik’s bare skin.

“Another productive genetics chat with Dr. Hayes, then?” Erik asks as he untucks Charles’s shirt in turn, using his powers to unbuckle his belt.

Charles gives him a petulant look. “Please don’t talk about Hayes if you’re about to…” He gestures downward and sends a sort of vague hopeful impression in Erik’s direction.

Erik raises his eyebrows. “Is that what’s about to happen?”

“And you call me infuriating,” Charles mutters, but he starts laughing again as Erik slides off him, pushing his chair back and sinking to his knees. Charles sends him a swell of gratitude mixed with anticipation as he rakes his fingers through his hair.

He’s about to tug Charles’s zipper down with his powers when a very loud scream echoes out in the hallway. They both freeze, and then a second later Charles sighs and gently pushes Erik’s head away.

“Christ,” Charles mutters, closing his eyes and resting his head against the back of the chair. “I’m sorry, darling, there’s so much broken glass, he’s going to need medical attention.”

Erik presses his thumbs down harder on the sides of Charles’s hips. “He’ll be fine for a few—”

“We’ll have to continue this tonight,” Charles says, sounding resigned.

Erik leans forward again and presses the top of his head into Charles’s stomach, letting out a groan of frustration into the fabric of his trousers.

Charles pats him lightly on the head. “Better yet, I say we volunteer for the next recruiting trip.” He pauses and clarifies, “The next _long_ recruiting trip.”

He sends Erik a vivid flash of a fantasy, a shiny red Cadillac on the side of a road in the middle of the desert, and the two of them in the back seat, Charles’s knees pressed up against his chest while—

“Stop, stop,” Erik says as he sits back on his ankles, scrubbing his hands over his face. “You’re making it worse.”

“Come now,” Charles says, briskly redoing his belt and tucking in his shirt. “You’re one of the most patient people I’ve ever met.” He bends over to kiss Erik on the cheek and then stands and readjusts himself.

“Oh, I nearly forgot!” he exclaims, holding up an index finger. “We’re decorating the tree this evening, around five.” After a pause, he adds quickly, “Of course I know you don’t celebrate Christmas, but it’s quite a tall tree—we could really use your powers with the highest ornaments.”

Erik looks up at him, about to say something dismissive about the saccharine nature of American Christmas traditions, but Charles is looking at him with a frighteningly earnest expression, and Erik only sighs. “Yes,” he says. “Of course.”

Charles doesn’t say anything in response, but he gives him a soft smile and runs a hand gently across the top of his head. As he crosses out of the room, he leaves behind a warm, enveloping cloud of deeply layered emotion, fondness and appreciation and love, a jumble of sensations that’s impossible to fully articulate—but something he’d instantly be able to mark out as Charles’s feelings towards him.

There are times when Erik is startled to remember that it’s been close to nine months since he first heard Charles give that lecture on genetics; often, it feels like no time has passed at all. Their day-to-day lives are full of research and training and strategizing and criss-crossing the country and managing the chaos of their swelling ranks—close to 30 mutants are living in the house now, only some of them teenagers, but many more of them acting like it.

But then, there are small moments, when Charles touches him softly or whispers in his mind, that make him stop and marvel at the amount of time that’s passed: that every single day since they rescued him from that CIA cell, Charles has been beside him, a steady, affectionate presence, resting softly on the surface of his mind. They bicker constantly, and he threatens to strangle Charles on a semi-regular basis, but these days, he rarely spends time thinking much about his life before Charles—and he’d have trouble imagining a world in which they weren’t facing the future side by side.

Out in the hallway, Charles and Hank are helping Sean to his feet as a few other residents look on in worry. There’s a lot of glass, yes, but as far as Erik can tell, only a little blood. Scott is hurrying past them, his glasses once again firmly affixed to his face. Erik catches him by his belt buckle.

“All set, then?” he asks, trying to keep his tone relatively unthreatening.

He’d drawn a firm line at picking up actual children—“We’re not running a school here, Charles,” he’d said impatiently, as Charles opened his mouth to protest, adding, “Or an orphanage.”—but Scott was an exception, shuffled around the foster care system after an unfortunate series of accidents while his brother, now one of their most promising recruits, spent the prior year in and out of prison.

Scott looks up at him and says, “I’m sorry I almost accidentally sliced off your leg, sir.” Even though he’s only ten, the opaque glasses tend to give Erik the vague feeling that the boy isn’t being wholly sincere when he speaks to him. Erik rolls his eyes.

“Try to keep them on in the future,” he says, roughly patting Scott on the head before continuing down the hallway.

He senses Angel’s favorite earrings in what he thinks of as the everyday kitchen, a room they’re close to outgrowing for most meal preparation as the number of residents climbs upwards. Angel seems to be alone, and she’s standing next to a pile of very unusual small metal shapes. Intrigued, he turns the doorknob with his powers—it’s odd, he notes, that the kitchen door is shut—and then lets out a yelp.

“Jesus, Erik!” Angel shouts, quickly pulling her top down. Mystique adds a very conservative long-sleeved dress to her natural form, which feels pointless since she spends a good portion of her training time naked.

“That’s strange, I was under the impression that this was the kitchen,” Erik says, putting his hands on his hips. “And that you have your own bedroom.”

“We were…” Angel vaguely gestures at the sheets of dough rolled out on the counters. There’s a smudge of flour on her nose and a matching one on Mystique’s cheek. He realizes then what the small metal shapes were, as she finishes weakly, “…baking cookies.”

Mystique rolls her eyes. “Save it, he doesn’t have a leg to stand on.” She turns to Erik, shaking her head. “How many times have I caught you and my brother in a ‘strategy session,’ huh?”

Erik raises his chin. “Just be sure to wash your hands.” He turns to leave, and then he looks back at them and says, “Charles wants to decorate the Christmas tree at five.”

Mystique raises an eyebrow. “It’s cute how you’re his messenger.”

Erik glares at her and then turns to stride out of the room.

He busies himself for an hour in his own study, which is next to Charles’s. He hadn’t seen the point of it, until Charles insisted that he’d probably want a space wholly to himself; Charles was correct.

The room is too large, and it’s plagued by multi-generational Xavier ostentation, gleaming paneled wood and thick carpeting and antique furniture that could probably finance the defense budget of a small nation, if they were to sell it. But it’s wholly redeemed by a series of exquisite brass fixtures—Erik unabashedly loves them, and tends to trace their curls and dips when he’s trying to think through anything complicated.

He heads towards the front parlor just after five and takes in the scene that greets him. “Saccharine” was clearly the appropriate word, as some crooner warbles a bunch of sentimental nonsense about Christmas and snow and families on the hi-fi. A good portion of the house’s residents are gathered around half a dozen cardboard boxes, cheerfully arguing as they pull out tinsel and little metallic balls. Alex is standing back and smiling as he watches Darwin show Scott how to string up lights on the enormous tree.

Charles is sitting in front of the fire with Emma, clinking a glass against hers. His cheeks are flushed and he sends Erik a warm telepathic greeting that somehow also feels extremely loose, and Erik rolls his eyes as he heads to the drinks cabinet in the corner of the room. Charles has locked it behind him, a necessity in a house full of dozens of young people, so Erik unlocks it with his powers.

_I thought you were taking care of Sean, _Erik sends over to him. _How have you been drinking already?_

Charles just laughs and raises his glass in Erik’s direction. _You can’t decorate a tree unless you’ve had a few_.

_Setting an excellent example for the children, I see._

_Sean is fine, in case you were wondering._

Erik carries his glass over to the sofa and gestures for them to make room, sitting down and winding up nearly on top of Charles. He says aloud, “I wasn’t.”

Charles laughs again, pressing up against him and giving him a quick, covert kiss on the cheek.

“I’m going to regret sitting here, aren’t I?” Emma says, though there’s no bite to it as she smiles into her martini glass.

As more of the house’s residents join in decorating, Erik looks over at the spectacular array of mutations on hand, abilities that could only be described as fantastical, even as Charles is continually building on his scientific theories about their genetic makeup. Perhaps his own powers aren’t even necessary this evening, he thinks with amusement, as he watches one girl stretch her arms to three times their regular length to string up the batch of lights towards the top of the tree. As a group, they’re spectacular, and they’re only growing stronger; when the next threat comes, they’ll be a force to be reckoned with.

Charles nudges his shoulder against Erik’s, shaking his head. “They’re decorating a tree, not preparing for battle.”

“You never know what might turn out to be a good training exercise,” Erik says. Emma throws her head back with laughter, and even Charles is laughing, his eyes shining in the glow of the fireplace as he reaches out to catch Erik’s free hand, resting it lightly against his thigh.

He spends the next half hour chatting with Charles and Emma, until they’re interrupted by an enormous cheer. Angel and Mystique are walking towards the center of the room, each balancing a large tray loaded with cookies, and everyone abandons their decorating to swarm them. Then, suddenly, it’s as if Erik can feel all of their enthusiasm inside of him, a warm, jittery excitement. He looks over at Charles questioningly.

_Just wanted to share their good feelings_, Charles says, giving him a soft smile. _Even if it’s only a brief respite from the next dangerous paramilitary maneuver you’re going to send them on._

Erik only laughs in response, and he leans even closer, basking in the feeling of Charles’s body and mind, a pair of warm, solid weights pressing against him, as he stretches out his powers to float an ornament to the very top of the tree.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [art for Contingency](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21320869) by [araydre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/araydre/pseuds/araydre)


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